Emerge Tools Blog | Symbolicating SwiftUI (and any Apple Framework), Part 1
Have you ever noticed that crash logs sometimes don't make much sense or are missing some symbols? Unlike traditional UIKit applications, Apple does not provide debug symbols (dSYMs) for SwiftUI. This means that any crash containing SwiftUI addresses in the stack trace will not be symbolicated.
When you use a crash reporting tool like Sentry, Crashlytics, or Bugsnag, you typically will upload your project's debug symbols (dSYMs) of every release version. These dSYMs enable these tools to symbolicate memory addresses of a crash report into a human-readable format.
Apple provides symbols for most system frameworks (UIKit, AVFoundation, etc.), but others like SwiftUI, Combine and Metal Performance Shaders Graph are an exception — no symbols are provided. Tools that rely on them handle this by not displaying anything or showing useless information like the memory address. This can make it harder to understand what is going on when reading crashes or Instruments traces.
The reason for this is because the SwiftUI binary in the shipped OS doesn't have symbols names. If we extract it (from the IPSW or iOS DeviceSupport folder: ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/iOS DeviceSupport), we can confirm this scenario.
