Should I remove NSLogs when releasing my App

Question

Is it advisable to do any NSLogging in a shipping app? I know that I should not in heavily used loops. Or not log too verbosely. But I am not sure if it is a good practice to do so.

Removing all the NSLogs prior to a release does not seem like a good practice too.

Answer 1

I think it is a good practice to not spam the user's device log.

For this, I have a macro, DebugLog, that is only active for debugging builds:

#ifdef DEBUG
#define DebugLog(fmt, ...) NSLog(fmt, __VA_ARGS__)
#else
#define DebugLog(fmt, ...)
#endif

For all log messages that are interesting to me for development, I use DebugLog. For all error messages that should be logged I use unconditional NSLog. This way the distribution builds don't clutter the user's console log. Only important messages get logged.

Answer 2

This is one of those coding philosophy questions, but in my production apps I use asl and configure it to be off by default, but leave the option (via an entry in Info.plist) to enable various levels of logging. I tend to agree with you that too many NSLogs in a shipping app looks bad.