Alternatives for mobile app analytics
Google Analytics works well and the reporting interface is fairly easy to navigate and find out the information you want. Some parts of the interface are bizarre though. They have two problems. On Android the library only supports one tracker instance and reporting so we can't report our events at the same time as the rest of the app reports its events. The second is that for numerical values (custom variables) the only thing they report is the average value which is spectacularly useless. I need to see the distribution of values. Talking to their support would appear to require forking out $150,000 a year before they will take the call.
I've also tried Mixpanel but had numerous issues with their Android library and server side. It has no builtin reports so you have to compose queries yourself, and even simple slicing and dicing data is a pain. I've had to write code to import all our data locally and then do analysis there to get reports like the pre-existing ones in Google Analytics. (I've been unable to get any issue addressed by their support.)
There is a conflict of interest with Flurry (in particular all the stuff they do other than analytics).
A solution hosted by someone else is preferable rather than self hosting due to the expected ramp up in volume of traffic. Searches turn up numerous analytics providers, but they all have web sites as their primary focus using a chunk of Javascript as the library. While there isn't that much difference in the events generated from a mobile app compared to a web site, there is a need for a robust Android and iOS library and for additional values to be tacked onto events, plus being able to use those values in reports and analysis. We also need to be able to partition data so that third parties can look at a subset of it that belongs to their app.
6 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 56.7 ms ] threadThanks for the suggestion.
Just curious -- what's the conflict of interest?
The conflict of interest in those cases is that in addition to analytics they provide "monetization" (basically adverts). If the app is using a different ad network then we would be giving a competitor ad network detailed analytics about the app and its usage.
Our solution is built for apps analytics, our SDKs are open source (go directly to the SDK: http://www.localytics.com/docs/), there's no advertising conflict of interest, and there are both free and upgraded plans available depending on your needs. More details and a full demo are available on our website.
It is only mentioned at the bottom of the FAQ, but being able to grant viewing permissions for specific apps is important to us.
Is there any specific reason why you require creating yet another user account with yet another username and yet another password? I'd much rather be able to use my existing Google credentials.