i use dumpsys to catch if app is crashed and process is still active. situation i used it is to find about remote machine app is crashed or not.
dumpsys | grep myapp | grep "Application Error"
or
adb shell dumpsys | grep myapp | grep Error
or anything that helps...etc
if app is not running you will get nothing as result. When app is stoped messsage is shown on screen by android, process is still active and if you check via "ps" command or anything else, you will see process state is not showing any error or crash meaning. But when you click button to close message, app process will cleaned from process list. so catching crash state without any code in application is hard to find. but dumpsys helps you.