HI all,
so we all know "pinch media" - the "spyware" software ;)
i'm searching for some really cool analytics softwares for my iphone application.
pinch media, is the one i know, it looks really great, but we all know, the reputation of this piece of software is very bad.
i'd like to know if i can use it, or if my app then is one of this spyware apps, for users (it isnt really, i know, but users might think it is, when i use this).
are there some alternatives? other programms, with the same good analysis?
I found admob and motally.com, but pinch media/Flurry is the best one atm.
Here is a good pdf that compares some of the main iPhone/iPod touch analytics providers
Try Google Analytics
Any analytics package which reports usage statistics back to a central server (Flurry, Google Analytics, etc.) will be considered "spyware" by some users, not just Pinch Media's offering. The really paranoid users will sniff data traffic out of your application and detect traffic from any service, no matter who provides it.
If you really care about those users who will be upset by this, give them the option to opt-out of data collection in your application's settings or when the application first starts.
If you are looking for more inside on your app, you should try heatma.ps. They let you view heatmaps for your app, and other interaction data.
Example heatmap:
I suggest you to take a look at Appsee
Appsee provides visual in-app analytics, including heatmaps, real user recording and user bahavior reprots. And you can create a free account there.
Flurry, Google Analytics, etc are central server to store the user's data.
If you want to build your private data center. you can visit this url
http://www.github.com/cobub
And the web site is: http://dev.cobub.com
to get the open source system (both server and client sides)
There are two kinds of analytics: business analytics and app performance analytics. Google Analtyics, Flurry etc are good for business analytics but app developers are mostly interested in knowing when app crashes, being able to capture app logs, impact of network speeds and carriers on performance of their apps. For app performance analytics, take a look at http://apigee.com/about/mobile-analytics . You not only get real time performance anlaytics but also ability to do some configuration changes in real time.
Related
Is there any easy and effective way to track user activities from my iPhone app. I have to record all actions performed by user in my application without any performance/frozen problems. There should be no limits like per second hits etc.... App is global and cross platform. It is better if I can write my own custom algorithm to make this functional.
You can also use google analytics
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/ios/
We use a service called Flurry Analytics. It works on all mobile platforms and we have had great experiences with it. Free too!
http://www.flurry.com/flurry-analytics.html
The app can collect all kinds of information in a very versatile manner and is efficient in when it sends the data back the the server. I believe it's only when the app terminates.
On the device side it is super easy to set up and beginning tracking user events.
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/
I want to integrate analytics into my iOS app to collect statistics about my users.
So far I found these two services:
http://www.localytics.com
http://code.google.com/intl/de-DE/mobile/analytics/docs/iphone/
I want a library that's easy to implement. Are there any more out there and what is your experience? What can you recommend?
I've used Flurry in several apps. Quite happy with it. Once the initial setup is done, it's quite easy to log and record metrics about pretty much anything within your app.
You can try heatma.ps to get insides on how people iteract with your applications.
Check out this article, I think it's very useful:
http://www.apptamin.com/blog/app-analytics-tools/
I have found UXCam very useful. It has very easy integration steps and provides user and mobile data you need. It lets you watch playback videos of users using your app and has rule based recording and analytics to filter out unusual session.
i want to create a application which sync my iPhone contacts to my server and vice-versa.
i read a article on google Get Google Sync on your phone . i want to this type of feature which directly update the contact without user interaction (however one time setting is desired).
any body have idea how the google sync work .
Please advice me that how can i achieve this task. any suggestion and link is greatly appreciated
I think it's important to separate the two overlapping approaches in your question.
Firstly, Google Sync is essentially a way to use Microsoft Exchange protocols and to setup a Mail / Contact / Calendar profile on an iPhone. The iPhone OS supports this feature, not an iPhone App in the App Store. Google Sync leverages this fundamental capability of the phone by exposing the data (mail, contacts, calendars) via these known protocols. If you want to expose data in this way to your users, setup a Microsoft Exchange server and ask questions on serverfault.
Secondly, there are iPhone apps. iPhone apps sold in the app store are not currently allowed to run in the background. This means you can't emulate functionality like iTunes or Mail where your music plays while you are browsing the web, or mail checking is done while you are playing a game of Mini Squadron. If you want this backgrounding capability, file a bug/enhancement with Apple.. However, you can interact with iPhone contacts (Address Book) via the API.. You can also of course "re-invent the wheel" and expose the data however you like via the internet, and consume that data from a custom iPhone App with the one caveat that users would need to actively launch your application to get to this data and it would not be integrated with the built-in iPhone Calendar, Address Book or Mail applications. Some good examples of that are some of the music community apps that have messaging systems built into them. Presumably that is all being done with web services.
EDIT: It is also worth mentioning that should you go the "iPhone App" route, you should at least consider if push notifications are right for you, and if so how you will handle it.
Have you seen the API-Docs?
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/ContactData/Conceptual/AddressBookProgrammingGuideforiPhone/100-Introduction/Introduction.html
Next there is an application I use called Funambol - it is a sync4j Server/Client. They have an open source application to sync contacts on the iPhone. Source is somewhere in their repository, informations here: http://forge.ow2.org/scm/?group_id=96
As slf told you your application must run in foreground. This may limit you.
Good luck & best regards,
Florian
The 3.0 SDK will allow your application to read contact data on the phone.
Web services will allow you to publish that data to your server, and receive updates.
You may also want to use coredata to store a hash of all contact data so you can tell what is new / updated and just send that data to your server.
I've been doing mobile app development for a long time (2001?), but the systems we worked with back then were dedicated mobile development environments (Symbian, J2ME, BREW). iPhone SDK is a curious hybrid of Mac OS X and Apple's take on mobile (Cocoa Touch).
But it is missing some stuff that other mobile systems have, IMO. Specifically:
Application background processing
SMS/MMS application routing (send an SMS to my application in the background)
API for accessing phone functions/call history/call interception
I realize that Apple has perfectly valid reasons for releasing the SDK the way they did. I am curious what people on SO think the SDK is missing and how would they go about fixing/adding it, were they an Engineering Product Manager at Apple.
The biggest shortcoming in my opinion is support for separating licensing from distribution.
What I mean by this is that it should be possible to download a trial version of an application and later purchase a license for that application (from an API call inside the application or from the app store). This would make it much easier to try-before-you-buy and get rid of the current duplicates of many applications with 'lite' versions.
I think lack of push notifications for apps is the big thing we're missing right now. With push, you can register your application to perform a task (like getting the most recent data from a web service) even when it's not running, at a time and frequency the OS decides is best. In an ideal world, along with the existing concept of iPhone apps loading quickly and resuming where you last left off, this solves the problem of not running in the background. I know some tasks will be more difficult or maybe impossible with this strategy, but it's still a pretty good compromise between third party applications and the iPhone's limited hardware.
Originally push was scheduled for last September, but it was removed from the beta SDK and not spoken of since then.
API's I'm personally looking for:
Apple80211 as a public API (private, current API is fine if documented)
Access to Volume buttons (semi-accessible via Celestial, private, needs new API)
Access to Calendar (private, API status unknown)
Access to Bluetooth + SPP profile (status unknown)
Access to Camera (directly, API status unknown)
Access to JavaScript runtime (directly, not through UIWebView, API status unknown)
WebKit access that's lower-level than UIWebView (private, current API is fine)
Access to Music Library (private, current API is fine)
Garbage Collection.
CoreData is missing.
You've mentioned some of the big ones - copy & paste (or in fact any way for apps to collaborate) is another huge omission.
It also seems to lack a desktop synch framework (at least if it exists I can't find it).
Language independence and especially lack of scripting is another pet peeve - objective-c is all very well but more languages to choose from would be good.
Inability to dynamically extend apps, via scripts or otherwise, is another big omission. This is partly an SDK/OS issue, partly licensing.
My list ordered by priority:
Mapping abstraction (the MapKit looks awesome), but that would require a new Google Maps TOS
Music library
Camera (photo + video) Access to more
UIViews, Apple designed some pretty nice custom ones for their apps
Better UIWebKit abstraction
The features I see missing that it should have is
Access to SMS
Direct Access to Google Maps App. You should be able have access to this so you could extend your application to use the built in features provided by Google Maps.
Access to the Bluetooth functionality of the phone.
Access to the Calendar. Why not allow access to simply post a calendar event for the user.
Access to Active Sync. It would great if we could directly access this and communicate back to the Exchange Server.
Core Image. They provide Core Animation but Core Image is missing. I hope that this is added to the API soon.
These are some of the features that my clients have access for in the past and are supprised when they are not available.
We definitely miss a Calendar API and SMS access. So many applications could leverage such APIs. The iPhone allows users to have everything in their pocket, but it's almost useless as long as developers cannot leverage this integration in their apps.
A language with proper namespaces.
A limitation that bugs me is lack of access to system features that require root or setuid. For example: opening privileged IP ports.
I'm not sure there is a good solution to this, as long as Apple's policy is to keep the device locked-down.
Allow program to set some kind of local timed event for your application to bring up an alert and launch your app if the user agrees (like any calendar app). You could do that with push notifications but there are many cases I'd hate to have to rely on a whole server infrastructure and network connectivity just to basically do some timed thing.
Some idea of what direction the user is facing. I cannot believe the GPS chip the newer iPhones use are not capable of reporting direction.
I would personally love to see
Access to the CoreTelephony Framework (Currently private). Which allows access to all the phone functions (Especially sending MMS / SMS).
Some sort of ability to run stuff in the background. While push notifications is ok for most things, but it is a bit hard to leverage CoreLocation (i.e. have the app show a notification at a certain location). Of course this would probably need an on/off button or app specific like push is.
animation view which will be reduce developer to make a cool app , of course the core business local still need consider more , but the view layer could more easy to use ....