what are the advantages and disadvantages in using Flurry or Localytics?
I can't answer about iOS, but the Android libraries for Flurry had a very half-baked feel to them when I tried them out about 3 months ago. There's a lot less power in their stats reporting and drilling down through the data can be like pulling teeth.
Additionally, I was getting wildly inaccurate session counts in a small closed beta test of my app (1000 sessions reported in a few minutes from one device). When I contacted Flurry support, it took them nearly a week to get back to me and then all I got was a fairly useless stock response. That alone knocked them straight off my list of potential analytics providers.
I've used Localytics on Android for hundreds of thousands of total installs at this point and am quite happy. Android gets treated as a first-class citizen (rather than feeling like a bolt-on on Flurry or even Google Analytics), and they have a pretty nice looking UI with a lot of good drilldown controls.
Both services are free and both services provide the same basic functionality of providing app analytics (e.g. number of users, type of devices, how the users are interacting with the app, etc.).
I have used both services for Android, although I am currently using Localytics because the Localytics library is open source. The Flurry library is closed source. Open source has the advantage that you can modify the library, as well as see exactly what the library is collecting.
Using flurry in your app you can trace your app, Suppose you want to track that this button pressed how many times ,You can use flurry it shows that in this location this app is used and that button is pressed that number of times.
DISADVantage:- Flurry is very slow it gives you results in 14-15 hours.
ADVANTAGE:- it is free
OTHER :- in place of flurry you can use google analytics(free) and omniture(Paid but give result faster)
you have to register yourself in flurry.com
Both of them store the data in public area. Although the data is so-called privacy, but it's not on your own server.
Flurry is free but provides much less detailed information, and flurry also only accepts up to 10 parameters per event. Localytics makes it easy to sort your data in many ways. For example I can look at all my users for the past week, now I can view users per day, or per hour. Then I can split the data to show me which users that played in the last week started playing the game for the first time, and then I can view that chart scaled to 100%. I could then add a filter so that I'm only looking at data from the users that started on a specific date, or specific week, or even multiple specific dates/weeks/etc. There are only a few things that I'd like from the localytics website that they don't provide, like retention data for days 8-13, or 15-27, or past 28 days, but those things can all be done through SQL queries.
Basically, flurry is free, but basic compared to what you get from localytics. Localytics I believe is free up until 10k MAU (monthly active users). Using localytics over flurry has made a huge difference on the product I'm on, we have been able to make much better decisions based on data.
Related
Several years ago I released an app (a free game) for iOS, which was largely unsucessful, settling to around an average of 5 downloads a month (terrible, I know). However, I recently happend to notice a huge (relatively) spike in downloads, up to around 300 downloads over the last 10 days.
Something seems strange about this latest batch of downloads however, for one thing they are all from China (My app is only localized for English, and never marketed outside the U.S.), and the "Active devices (opt-in only)" statistic shows 3 devices used over that same time period.
Even stranger, the "Product Page Views" statistic shows only 6 views over this same period that had 300 downloads?!
Is something nefarious going on, or might there be a benign explanation for this huge spike in downloads?
If anyone is curious, or if it helps find the cause, the app is Acorn Mayhem, as found here. (Note: this is not intended as self promotion, and if including the link violates stack overflow rules, feel free to edit it out)
in response to being put on hold:
This question appears to have been put on hold as "off topic", I don't belive it should be, it does involve tools used directly and exclusively for programming (iTunes connect, which is only used by programmers) It would not be seen by the people who actually use it if it was on superuser, and I think the number of other people who have experienced the same problem and replied in a short time shows that it is on topic and helpful to a large portion of the programming community.
There is a thread on Apple forums about the issue https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/84146
I reported this to Apple yesterday through iTunesConnect and received a call back today (my spike started 8/16 and is just starting to trail off now). They are investigating this; the call lasted over 10 minutes. They promised to keep me in the loop so I will report back when I hear something.
same here too. a game I released a year ago had very few downloads. Over the last two months I have seen a slight increase in downloads, 1 or 2, maybe up to 5 per day, all from China. All of a sudden in the last week I have seen 50, 80, and yesterday it peaked at 123 downloads.
I should also mention, this is a free game, with AdMob adverts.
Either the people who download the game aren't actually playing it at all (not one single ad show in China) or AdMob just doesn't work in China ???
either way - I've had about 500 downloads in the last week compared to ~300 in the entire previous year.
there is an IAP to upgrade the game and remove ads, needless to say, not one single user has paid.
a very strange situation. I wish I knew what was driving the Chinese downloads but I can't find anything pointing to my game ?! Also iTunes Connect seems to say they are coming from store browsing ?!
curiouser and curiouser ...
Similar story here:
I have 2 apps, that I made about 2 years ago basically for fun. They get about 20-35 downloads per day. Since 17 Aug, they receive about 120-150 per day, all the extra downloads from China. These numbers don't have any effect on my admob performance, and no significant changes on firebase. I call them ghost-downloads.
I switched one of the apps from free to paid. The downloads for that app went down to zero (as I expected)
If you want to have an accurate real user traffic stats, check the "Daily Active Users" & "Daily Active Devices" from itunes connect as reference.
From my own stats, I can see there are extra ~100 download spike daily from Chinese market, but the DAU stays the same, which means these downloads were not initiated by users, might be a 3rd party app crawler automated the crawling for apps using simulators or automation iOS devices. So don't worry about it, the trend should go away in a while.
If you are curious which 3rd party app crawlers are downloading your apps, google "[your app name] + 应用", you should find tons of them. Websites like these crawl lots of app data and run SEO to attract traffic, and benefits from online advertisements (adsense, etc.)
I have the same phenomenon across free apps in the App store. It results in approximately 1000 downloads from China per day, spread pretty evenly across about 15 apps. Each app download is around 100-200MB so that implies a reasonable burden on the App store servers if it is happening with other apps also. I contacted Apple and they did not seem to ask anything but questions that clearly indicated a complete lack of interest in understanding the issue. They suggested that the problem was not a problem but a volume download program. They then asked to see screenshots from affected users.
The exact same thing happened to me (hundreds of extra downloads per day from China only) within the past week. It's not just one app but every one I have created so far. At first I thought it was an iTunes Connect bug but maybe my apps were just featured somewhere public? There are over a Billion people there after all. ;)
I would like to confirm this, and share some data as well. Take a look. The deviation in traffic started around mid of July, and all of my apps have been downloaded roughly in the same amount. Few days ago I noticed that downloads returned to their normal level. All of abnormal purchases took place from China. Maybe this will shed some light on the source, but I doubt that this traffic generated by real people.
At first I thought this was great news, a lot of downloads, but then my cynical side popped in. Perhaps they are downloading the IPAs unzipping them and looking at the source code. They would only have the front end, but that's half the solution. Here is an article about pirated apps
https://www.cultofmac.com/224075/china-has-its-own-app-store-that-lets-users-install-pirated-ios-apps-without-jailbreaking/
You want to look for ways to obfuscate your code.
Updates:
By the end of September my abnormal Chinese ghost-downloads have disappeared. Everything is back to normal.
On the 8th of September I experienced something much more extreme an unexpected: Approximately 6000 "downloads" from Sweden. It happened only once.
Is there any way to track iPhone app utilisation? I'd like to know every time a user has opened or interacted with my app. I don't want any other information about the user or their device. I don't even need to identify the user. I just want to monitor frequency of use and inactivity.
I thought of possibly creating a unique ID using time in seconds and then writing some code in viewWillAppear that sends an email containing the unique ID. But I don't even know if my App will be approved for sale in the AppStore with this function.
Any suggestions would be welcome - thanks you very much in advance for any effort spent on answering this question...
just use Flurry in you App
Flurry Analytics delivers powerful insight into how consumers interact with your mobile applications in real-time. Over 60,000 companies have chosen Flurry Analytics to use in more than 150,000 applications across iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, JavaME and HTML5.
Flurry Analytics helps mobile application developers make better apps, deepen consumer engagement and improve monetization of their applications. The service is free, cross-platform, easy to integrate, able to handle data loads of any size application and frequently updated with new, advanced features.
You can use Google Analytics to track these figures.
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/ios/
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Is there a good alternative for Flurry ?
I use it because it is simple to integrate, but i'm not so happy with the webinterface. I miss the google-analitic-ness, but i dont want to use google.
So, what are your experiences with other analytics for iPhone ?
greets Simon
Edit:
http://www.localytics.com/ Nice GUI, good API
Simon, check out Localytics (I work there). Our service is real-time, our SDKs are open source, there are both free and paid service plans, and we just released a huge update to our web interface. You can access the demo (no registration required) here: https://dashboard.localytics.com/demo
--Brian
AskingPoint.com (I work there and am the founder).
Not free, now starts at 49$ (supports iOS and Android APPS)
Has the following capabilities:
Basic Analytics
Unlimited Named Custom Events with or without data.
Unlimited Timed Events with or without data.
In-App Msgs and Push Notifications
Monetization tools (Ads, Cross Promotion)
A Dashboard.
An embedded Ratings widget that is controlled from your account dashboard, uses your analytics and is translated into 30 languages.
Free Data Export (all data).
Fast and easy integration.
We have an App for viewing your data on the go, and our web interface does NOT use flash so you can alternatively view your dashboard on your iPad or iPhone in a browser... but use our app instead.
We don't and won't sell your data. We are free because we plan on eventually making our money from an opt-in service that we will charge third parties for the revenue from which we will share with the Apps that participated and helped generate it.
There is also HockeyApp. I am comparing Flurry and HockeyApp based solely on grokking their website propaganda, and my summary is that HockeyApp is more "fix-centric", whereas Flurry is more "sales-centric:" Dev & QA would benefit more from HockeyApp's great crash reporting features, and Product Management would benefit more from Flurry's crazy slice-and-dice analytics. Hopefully that helps guide you based on what you are trying to accomplish.
Update: I had a quick chat with the Crittercism dudes and wanted to add my findings. Their offering seems to fill the gap between fix-centric HockeyApp, and sales-centric Flurry. It uses the same underlying PLCrashReporter library to produce robust crash reports like HockeyApp does, and it seems to have more Flurry-like analytics than HockeyApp. Also, pricing ... Flurry is free (though they seem to monetize through advertising on their WWW interface). HockeyApp has pricing based on plans, starting with a $10/month plan. Crittercism prices based on # of active users of your app and you have to work with their sales folks to eek out an actual number.
Also update regarding support: HockeyApp's support is excellent; I've never waited more than 10 minutes to get a response back to my questions and the responses are succinct and accurate. Flurry, about 24 hr turnaround and a fairly unpersonalized and lifeless response that was mostly accurate. Crittercism has been quite fast to respond to my inquires; they have a "Chat Now!" button that put me through to the CTO, which was great for the technical questions I had.
Some key specifics and elaborations:
HockeyApp automatically symbolicates users' crashreports on their web
interface, and can group crashes by crashing API. Flurry does not;
it just shows you a bunch of raw crashes and you get to manually
symbolicate them one instruction at a time (using atos -- you can't
use symbolicatecrash because Flurry doesn't give you a proper
.crash report). Be aware that line numbers in HockeyApp can be off
by one or two lines.
The crash reports that Flurry shows you do not include other running
processes, whereas HockeyApp's do. In fact, it appears that Flurry
crash reports are truncated to 255 characters or so. They are anemic compared to HockeyApp.
For crashes you mark as fixed in HockeyApp's web UI, HockeyApp can
inform a user who subsequently experiences such a crash that the
issue has been fixed in a new version.
Flurry has very deep analytics prowess that HockeyApp cannot touch:
tracking usage stats, customer engagement, average session length,
geographic distribution of your app, user retention over time.
Flurry is free; HockeyApp (free up to 10 apps). Both
provide email support, but only HockeyApp provides a discussion
group. Both can record arbitrary messages (like a JSON response from
the server that caused your app to crash) but only HockeyApp
indicates that this message can be any length.
Alas, these are just a few random tidbits that appealed to my developer-nature and cause me to prefer HockeyApp. I wonder what would happen if I used both in my app!
If you have 7 minutes, HockeyApp has a video walkthrough that I found quite useful.
Cobub Razor is an open source free system like Flurry. And it opens both SDK and web side source codes.
Demo: http://demo.cobub.com/razor/en
GitHub: http://www.github.com/cobub/razor
Mixpanel, I have heard a lot of good thing about their product https://mixpanel.com/
If you deploy an application through the iTunes app store, what usage information do you get from Apple? Do you only get the number of downloads/sales, and does this differ for free vs. paid apps? Do you get any information regarding how often it is used, crash logs, demographics info, etc? Is the only way to build hooks to your own server to track this information and would such an app even get approved?
I've seen articles such as this one that includes quotes like:
only about 20 percent of users return to use a free app the day after they first download it and by 30 days out, less than five percent are using the app.
Is that based on surveys, or is it data that comes from Apple? There doesn't appear to be much publicly available data except when Apple shows the top applications, but that is just based downloads or ratings, and nothing deeper.
Most of this information comes from companies like Pinch Media and Admob. They supply libraries you can include in you app which inform their servers of events in your app (specifically launch but also other events decided by you).
They use these events to provide aggregate information on iPhone apps. Several reports have been published recently referencing this data.
You only receive usage information if you somehow program the reporting of such information into your app.
Number of Downloads (Sales if a non-free app) and more recently crash logs are the only information you receive from Apple. you do not even receive personal information about WHO is was that bought your app, only that they did.
You won't get usage statistics from Apple, only download and sales statistics. The reporting is slightly different for free apps(as they won't show up in the financial report), but basically the same information is provided.
You can however track usage information on your own by having your application ping a remote server every time the app is accessed. You can use the unique device id to track a specific user. This will be dependent on internet access for the iPhone/iPod Touch.
Apple does give you how many downloads have occurred as well as what countries they are from. If you want more detailed usage statistics you will have to go to a third party solution, or write it yourself.
Unless Apple is secretly sending usage information when an app is opened, I don't see how anyone can get aggregate statistics about the whole app store. When I upload an app, it is in binary format, and it is probably unlikely that anyone adds in their own code to secretly do this.
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How much can a developer charge for an iPhone app like Twitterrific?
I want to know this because I need such an application with the same functionality for a new community website. I can do Ruby but have no experience with Objective-C. So it would be interesting for me if I should start reading books about iPhone programming or outsource the work to a iPhone programmer.
I'm one of the developers for Twitterrific and to be honest, I can't tell you how many hours have gone into the product. I can tell you everyone who upvoted the estimate of 160 hours for development and 40 hours for design is fricken' high. (I'd use another phrase, but this is my first post on Stack Overflow, so I'm being good.)
Twitterrific has had 4 major releases beginning with the iOS 1.0 (Jailbreak.) That's a lot of code, much of which is in the bit bucket (we refactor a lot with each major release.)
One thing that would be interesting to look at is the amount of time that we had to work on the iPad version. Apple set a product release date that gave us 60 days to do the development. (That was later extended by a week.)
We started the iPad development from scratch, but a lot of our underlying code (mostly models) was re-used. The development was done by two experienced iOS developers. One of them has even written a book: http://appdevmanual.com :-)
With such a short schedule, we worked some pretty long hours. Let's be conservative and say it's 10 hours per day for 6 days a week. That 60 hours for 9 weeks gives us 540 hours. With two developers, that's pretty close to 1,100 hours. Our rate for clients is $150 per hour giving $165,000 just for new code. Remember also that we were reusing a bunch existing code: I'm going to lowball the value of that code at $35,000 giving a total development cost of $200,000.
Anyone who's done serious iPhone development can tell you there's a lot of design work involved with any project. We had two designers working on that aspect of the product. They worked their asses off dealing with completely new interaction mechanics. Don't forget they didn't have any hardware to touch, either (LOTS of printouts!) Combined they spent at least 25 hours per week on the project. So 225 hours at $150/hr is about $34,000.
There are also other costs that many developer neglect to take into account: project management, testing, equipment. Again, if we lowball that figure at $16,000 we're at $250,000. This number falls in line with Jonathan Wight's (#schwa) $50-150K estimate with the 22 day Obama app.
Take another hit, dude.
Now if you want to build backend services for your app, that number's going to go up even more. Everyone seems surprised that Instagram chewed through $500K in venture funding to build a new frontend and backend. I'm not.
The Barack Obama app took 22 days to develop from first code to release. Three developers (although not all of them were full time). 10 people total. Figure 500-1000 man hours. Contracting rates are $100-150/hr. Figure $50000-$150000. Compare your app to Obama.app and scale accordingly.
There are ways of paying less to get an application, developed than paying the going rate, but very often you get what you pay for - inexperienced developers who leave you with a mess of spaghetti code that's impossible to maintain, or experienced developers with whom you have to communicate across a cultural and language gap.
Developing an app like Twitterific is not easy. It's an extraordinarily polished app with a lot of attention to detail that most people - indeed many developers - would fail to notice or realize the effort behind. You may be able to get a Twitter iPhone client written for $3500 or $5000 by going offshore or by being willing to "work with inexperienced developers", but you're not going to get Twitterific for that, and it's doubtful you'd get even a halfway decent application for that amount.
And you likely will end up spending a lot of time managing the process, going back and forth on requirements, and fighting to get what you really want instead of what they want to give you.
There's also a risk with "cut-rate" development, whether it's offshore or just using inexperienced developers - you may very well end up with something you can't use, or something that gets 1 star ratings because it crashes or behaves erratically. You might find the occasional underpriced gem of a developer, but they won't stay underpriced for long given the sheer demand in this market right now.
By virtue of my books and blog, people often reach out to me when they need help with their iPhone applications. I get, on average, 4 or 5 inquiries a month from people asking for help fixing applications they had developed either over-seas or by inexperienced developers here in the States. In most cases, I end up having to tell them they'd be better off throwing their code out and starting over with a developer who knows what they're doing rather than trying to fix the code they bought on the cheap. If they insist on trying to "fix" what they have, I decline the work.
I am a very good iPhone app developer, and I charge over $150 per hour for my services. I have a ton of experience building iPhone apps and their server side components. I have also been called in on several occasions to fix offshore developed apps. Here's my take.
Design costs money, good design costs lots of money. Expect several designer weeks of work per app screen. Offshore teams do not do design.
Server development and infrastructure is critical if the app is to succeed. A slow server response, or an overloaded server will hamper your app, and crimp sales and satisfaction. The server side of the equation will cost the most and take the most time to develop. Those who offshore their server development will find that quality and uptime are both terrible, in my experience.
App development if done right takes time too. A professional developer will ensure all HIG rules are followed, the app is properly structured and contains no known errors, it performs well, and it passes the app store validations. Offshore teams just cut code.
I'm just about to release a shopping app for a client. The design work was done by 2 client in-house designers over 2 weeks, quick because they had all the image assets already. Think 2 people x 10 days x 8 hours = ~$24,000. The server side had to be modified to provide data for the iPhone app. We used their in-house team and in-house platform and in-house API, 2 developers, 4 weeks, or about $50,000 and that's because they already have a web shop and API. Cost them about $400,000 to get there (excluding platform). And I wrote the app side in 3 weeks, given that a lot of my code is duplicated from previous projects, another ~$25,000, the cheapest app I ever did.
Total spent: ~$100,000, and that's insanely cheap!
And they will give this away for free so clients will buy from their store from their iPhones.
For your app, Peter, if you have the servers and the APIs and the design, I'd guess at $30,000 to $60,000 depending on complexity. If you do not have the design, double it. If you do not have the APIs, double again...
I am an account exec at a web and mobile development company and hear this question everyday. Unfortunately, iPhone apps are not cheap. You can expect around $100 per hour if you are staying on US soil. I have seen some offshore Indian developers out there for as low as $20 per hour. It all depends on the number and complexity of the functions you wish the app to perform. Simple one function apps are normally around 4-5k. They are so expensive because you are paying a team of people a healthy hourly wage and any type of raw prototyping, development, and coding takes time. Apps can exceed 60-100k pretty easily. Southwest Airlines making an app with a full ecommerce platform that allows you to buy tickets over your phone is an example. All of that porting into their IT is a big job.
And offshoring the project is definitely not always a better option. If you do so you better know who you are dealing with. Do not get me wrong there folks over there who do a bad ass job for a way better deal, but they are not that easy to find. Those guys could fuck around for 5 months on a simple project that would take 6 weeks here, or just not complete it at all and hand it over half finished. I have seen this scenario many times where we finish the work. The project management becomes a challenge. It can be difficult to communicate exactly what you want the app to do.
River of News for the iPad took about 400 hours of development to get to version 1.0 and I don't know how many hours my designer spent (20-50?). At US labor rates that's at least $40,000. But that sort of tight development was only possible because it was a one man operation. There is an enormous amount of overhead added when you separate the person writing the code from the person deciding what the product is going to do.
If you are going to send it offshore you'd better know exactly what you want. With the language and time difference it's very hard to do iterative design where you are exploring what is possible.
Appsamuck iPhone tutorials is aiming for 31 days of tutorials ending in 31 small apps developed for the iPhone all the source code for which is available to download. They also provide a commercial service to build apps!
If you want to know if you can do the coding, well at least you can download the code and see if anything there is helpful for your needs. On the flip side you can also get a quote from them for developing the app for you, so you can try both sides of the coin, outsource and in-house. Of course it all depends on how much time you have too! It's certainly worth a look!
(OK, after my last disastrous attempt to try and post a useful piece of help, I went off hunting around!)
I am the developer for Coupious mobile coupons iPhone app and with the amount of time that I spent on that application (v1.0 - v1.5), it was probably a $15,000 - $20,000 investment. However, to be fair, I do admit that I was the only developer working on it and when I started the project, I had never seen or used Objective-C before. Despite that, three months later, it was released so the numbers are probably a little skewed because there was a fair amount of learning going on as well as coding.
However, iPhone competent developers run in the range of $80-$150 depending on their skill and time with the platform. I would say that for a simple application, an app would probably run 2K-5K, a medium complexity app would run 5K-15K and a fairly complex app running 15K-30K. Game applications could be even more.
The reason it is so high is that the skill is fairly specialized and not everyone is able to do it
I hate to admit how little I've done an iPhone app for, but I can tell you I won't be doing that again. The guy who said that "simple, one function apps can be done .. [by solo developers]... for $5K" is correct; however, that is still lowball, and presumes almost no project design, graphic design or network backend work.
The rates that were quoted above are what you would expect to pay US developers; however, I do know some people who have been able to get their apps built for as little as $4,000 by using offshore developers.
Here is a blog post from a group that did this: http://www.lolerapps.com/why-outsourcing-iphone-apps-was-a-no-brainer-for-us
Also, Carla White wrote a fantastic eBook about the process she used to outsource her app called "Inside Secrets to an iPhone App". She talks about how she got a great deal because she was willing to work with a team that was still learning iPhone app development.
So, there are alternatives to the higher price developers discussed above.