This is a submission for DEV's Summer Bug Smash: Smash Stories.
TL;DR. I wired Sentry into my Android app behind a careful guard so that a build with no DSN behaves exactly as if the SDK were absent. I reviewed it. I built it both ways. Both green. Then I put the APK on a phone and it died on launch, every time, before a single line of my code ran. The guard was real code that was never reached, because a dependency had quietly added a ContentProvider to my manifest. The fix is one line. The reason I could not have caught it is the story.
The setup
I was adding Sentry to WhyRep, a workout tracker I am building solo. The app is native Kotlin and Compose on Android, with about 10,000 lines in the app module, and until that week it had no error reporting at all.
I made one design choice I was pleased with. The SDK would be DSN-gated:
