Crashes are silent failures but as I mentioned: you can get a lot of your crashes reported via the App Store. This is why I prefer crashes in this situation: it gives me something actionable over silent failures on the client.
And you will find the problem very early if you crash. You are much less likely to find the problem if you don’t.
What have you found useless about the crash reports from the App Store? It would be really nice for it to have something like a breadcrumb capability, but typically the stack trace of the crash is sufficient to see what went wrong.
