IPhone Analytics Recommendation.

#1

Post by tmpk » Wed, Dec 30, 2009, 9:57 PM UTC

I want to put analytics code into my iPhone app, and would like to get recommendations for analytic services others on HN have used. Thanks.

Re: IPhone Analytics Recommendation.

#2

Post by lowkey » Thu, Dec 31, 2009, 12:20 AM UTC

A friend co-founded http://www.localytics.com/ who have a real-time solution in this space. It is free so worth a try though I haven't tried it myself.

Re: IPhone Analytics Recommendation.

#3

Post by Zev » Thu, Dec 31, 2009, 5:38 AM UTC

We (Colloquy) built our own analytics for our app. It shows us exactly what we want to see, and gives us the raw data to examine as needed. Prior to that, we had played around with Medialets analytics (which were quite nice, but not quite what we wanted, in terms of how to look at the data or how it worked (although I've heard that Medialets has since improved their analytics in this respect)).

Its not terribly complicated, just POST'ing some data with NSURLConnection. http://colloquy.info/project/browser/trunk/Mobile/Controller... is our implementation, if you're interested. Its under a BSD license (although you'll have to write your own way of sorting through the data).

Re: IPhone Analytics Recommendation.

#4

Post by gyardley » Thu, Dec 31, 2009, 12:45 PM UTC

I co-founded and ran Pinch Media, which recently (transaction announced last week and closed yesterday) merged with Flurry. Now I'm doing product management there.

I'm assuming you've written a native app vs. a web app. (If not, my apologies - ignore any advice I give you.) While I'm ridiculously biased, I'd recommend going with Flurry Analytics. In a couple months, it'll have the superset of features from both Pinch and Flurry. The data is processed using Hadoop, and reporting updates very quickly. It's built for multiple platforms, so it'll stay with you if you decide to build for multiple phones. And the company's well-backed and doing well financially - which is an important thing to consider, because once you release a smartphone application with analytics code in it, at least some installs are out there forever, since you can't force 100% of your users to upgrade.

Of course, because I'm ridiculously biased, you probably should check out other solutions in the space as well. :)

Re: IPhone Analytics Recommendation.

#5

Post by xsmasher » Thu, Dec 31, 2009, 6:12 PM UTC

I've used flurry - It's easy to integrate and good for charting numbers and new users.

The "events" and crash tracking functionality was not as useful as I had hoped - if I have a rare crash I'd like to see the events that lead to that crash, but that data is not linked together. I'd also like to know the phone model an OS for the device that crashed, but the OS and device data is logged separately and isn't connected to the crash reports.

Maybe the event integration will improve with the Pinch Media merger.