Saturday, May 22, 2010

iPhone Analytics

Pretty early on when I started developing iPhone applications, I added analytics to my apps. Specifically Pinch Media's package. Until recently I have been pretty happy with the analytics I've gotten from their system. Not that long ago, Pinch Media was absorbed into Flurry. That's when things went bad. Specifically:

1. Flurry reports session based analytics. Interesting if you are a free/add based developer. Not so much for a paid app developer. Pinch was much better in that it reported based on device.
2. They don't answer their email. The automated response email doesn't count. The Pinch folks were really responsive.

So, I thought about this for a bit and came up with the criteria that I'm going to use as I go out and review different analytics companies. Basically, it comes down to the questions that I want to be able to answer from my analytics.

1. I want to localize my app. What languages do my customers speak? Country != language. Some of those nice Canadians prefer French. Flurry only reports sessions by region (Europe, NA, etc.) Not very useful for making a decision.

2. How many of my customers are trying to use an iPad? Are my customers primarily iPhone or iPod? What percentage are running new enough hardware that they will be able to take advantage of the new multi-tasking features in iPhone OS 4.0?

3a. What iPhone OS version are people running? If I need to move my app to 3.1, how many of my existing customers will I leave behind?

3b. Based on last week's stats, how many sales will I loose next week for moving to 3.1? As iPhone OS 4.0 is released, how quickly are my current customers and new customers moving to 4.0?

4. I realize that my apps are very small within the overall app store ecosystem. Do I get access to app store wide stats and trends towards the above questions?

5. Looking at the above metrics, compare user count to average session count. Is there a disparity somewhere? e.g. Do iPad users buy/install my app but not use it because they are frustrated with it for some reason? That would imply that I have a problem that I need to work on somewhere.

6. Does the event/action tracking system have an export function so that custom reports can be run on the events? I want to be aggregate the counts of some of my events and such.

7. Can I export my app's data and compare it to my Lite app's data? That would be very interesting.