Using try/catch for preventing app from crashes

Question

I have been working on an Android app which uses try/catch frequently to prevent it from crashing even on places where there is no need. For example,

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Answer 1

Another perspective, as someone who writes enterprise software on a daily basis, if an app has an unrecoverable error, I want it to crash. Crashing is desirable. If it crashes, it gets logged. If it crashes more than a few times in a short period of time, I get an e-mail saying that the app is crashing and I can verify that our app and all the web services we consume are still working.

So the question:

Is

try{
  someMethod();
}catch(Exception e){}

good practice? No! Here are a few points:

1. The MOST important thing: This is a bad customer experience. How am I supposed to know when something bad is happening? My customers are trying to use my app and nothing works. They can't check their bank account, pay their bills, whatever my app does. My app is completely useless, but hey, at least it didn't crash! (Part of me believes this "Senior" dev gets brownie points for low crash numbers, so they're gaming the system.)

2. When I'm doing development and I write bad code, if I'm just catching and swallowing all exceptions at the top layer I have no logging. I have nothing in my console, and my app fails silently. From what I can tell, everything appears to work okay. So I commit the code... Turns out my DAO object was null the whole time, and the customer's payments were never actually updating in the DB. Whoops! But my app didn't crash, so that's a plus.

3. Playing devil's advocate, let's say I was okay with catching and swallowing every exception. It's extremely easy to write a custom exception handler in Android. If you really just have to catch every exception, you can do it in one place and not pepper try/catch all over your codebase.

Some of the developers I've worked with in the past have thought crashing was bad.

I have to assure them we want our app to crash. No, an unstable app is not okay, but a crash means we did something wrong and we need to fix it. The faster it crashes, the earlier we find it, the easier it is to fix. The only other option I can think of is allowing the user to continue in a broken session, which I equate with pissing off my userbase.