Under the Bridge

Google Analytics

So chances are that you have some vague awareness of Google Analytics, even if only at our level of click, click, and there’s Google Analyticator plugged in and doing its magic of letting us know that you, you average person you, view 1.30 pages/visit during your 00:01:43 average time on site, and other such utterly not fascinating trivia which presumably there might be some reason we might care about someday.

But whatever, it’s more interesting to get some feedback on how people are using your app, and if you want to use Google Analytics for that too, here is a very nicely detailed walkthrough for you:

How To Integrate Google Analytics Tracking Into Your Apps In 7 Minutes

Of course, we would be remiss to not promptly point out that you may not want to do that at all, as the other big change in the latest Developer Agreement that most Flash-fixated fellows have forborne to comment upon so you might have missed, is

… Device Data may not be provided or disclosed to a third party without Apple’s prior written consent. Accordingly, the use of third party software in Your Application to collect and send Device Data to a third party for processing or analysis is expressly prohibited…

It’s not 100% clear what exactly qualifies as “Device Data” … but we’ll be sure to keep you as top on it as we are!

h/t: iPhone OS Development Blog!

4
  • Andy

    Is it really ethical to track what a user is doing in an app, on their device ? When this kind of ‘phoning home’ happens on the desktop there’s always a shitstorm of controversy, and yet it seems to have become acceptable to do this on a mobile device. Usually, on the desktop, if an app communicates back to the developer it’s good form to ask the permission of the user first. iPhone apps don’t even acknowledge that this is going on, never mind ask the user if its OK first.

    These are not web page hits we’re tracking here. I can’t understand how this isn’t controversial. I wonder if Apple’s clause is expressly there to prevent apps spying on user behaviour.

  • http://www.alexcurylo.com/ Alex

    > These are not web page hits we’re tracking here.

    Personally, I don’t really see a significant difference between tracking what pages on your site a user views and tracking what screens of your application a user views.

    Indeed, the vast majority of applications out there could be implemented as an HTML5 application without undue difficulty right now, and once we have WebGL in the phone’s WebKit, there’ll be pretty close to nothing as effective capability difference. Sounds like you’re OK with the HTML5 version using Google Analytics every time a page in a web app is hit; well then, what’s different about the Objective-C version using Google Analytics every time a UIViewController is loaded?

  • http://www.14oranges.com S

    I have asked Google Analytics folks to see if they have plans to address the issue. You can track here http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google Analytics/thread?tid=76fc681d2af2f086&hl=en

  • http://www.14oranges.com S

    It would appear that Apple has relaxed their rules around using 3rd party statistics cause I cannot find that clause anymore.