iOS, like any operating system, stores crash logs when something goes wrong. For my two main iOS devices – my iPhone 5s and my iPad Air – I have 1,451 crash logs. For the iPhone 6, which I’m returning (I’m still waiting for Apple to send someone to pick it up), I have 567 crash logs. That’s in just one week of use.
When you sync an iOS device to your Mac using iTunes, the device copies crash logs to your disk. You’ll find them in your home folder, in Library/Logs/CrashReporter/MobileDevice, where there is a folder with the name of each of your devices.
It obvious that users don’t see all of these crashes, but they are still crashes. Here are some of the most recent crashes:
Date: 2014-09-26 23:36:27 +0100
Exception Code: 0xbaad9047
Reason: Couldn't register com.apple.mobilemail.gsEvents with the bootstrap server. Error: unknown error code (1100).
This generally means that another instance of this process was already running or is hung in the debugger.
Date: 2014-10-02 15:07:41 +0100
Exception Code: 0xfaded322
Reason: Watchdog: Thermal not updating, backboardd 0.002312s last successful ping: 1310u0 1210m0/1 [...]
Date/Time: 2014-09-29 09:00:05.066 +0100
Launch Time: 2014-09-26 10:53:01.792 +0100
OS Version: iOS 8.0.2 (12A405)
Report Version: 105
Exception Type: EXC_RESOURCE
Exception Subtype: CPU
Exception Message: (Limit 50%) Observed 76% over 180 secs
Triggered by Thread: 1
Most of these crash logs are about 450 K, with more than 250 MB of logs for each of my two main devices. I don’t know if the crash logs are deleted from the devices after syncing, but if they continue adding up, that could eat up a lot of free space.