BT

Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

Write for InfoQ

Topics

Choose your language

InfoQ Homepage News Apple Opens Up Engagement Metrics with App Analytics Beta

Apple Opens Up Engagement Metrics with App Analytics Beta

Leia em Português

This item in japanese

Bookmarks

Apple has opened up its new App Analytics service for beta testing. The service was initially mentioned at last WWDC and aims to provide a way to learn how customers “discover and engage with your apps.”

According to the invitation that Apple sent out to registered developers, App Analytics will allow developers to:

  • See how often customers visit an app's page on the App Store
  • Understand how many users launch an app
  • Check apps and In-App Purchase sales
  • Create custom marketing campaign links that can be later tracked
  • Find out which websites refer the most users.

App Analytics enters a field where multiple third-party analytics providers are already offering their services, including Flurry, App Annie, and AppFigures. The initial list of App Analytics features makes clear that its strong point is about opening up App Store analytics to developers to learn about customer engagement, a feature that is not available to competitors. On the other hand, existing third-party services do offer a wider range of analytics, including real-time rankings, country-specific data, etc. Furthermore, according to initial user reporting, the new service is not able to provide access data "from inside the App Store," such as about which queries where used to find an app, featured categories, etc.

In comparison to other services, App Analytics does not require developers to write any code or integrate a specific SDK within their apps. This will likely limit the kind of statistical data that will be available, whereas competitor services allow developers to add checkpoints to learn how users effectively use their apps. At the moment, in fact, it seems that App Analytics will only be able to provide information about app launches.

The service is being progressively opened to more developers on a first-in-first-served basis. It is not yet clear when the service will enter production.

Rate this Article

Adoption
Style

BT