03.23.2015

Gathering Analytics for iOS Apps

In this article, I’ll try to give you an overview of the tools for remote diagnostics of your mobile apps. The list is not complete because I’ll only describe the tools that I personally have experience with, and my experience might be limited.

Testflight

Since TestFlight had been acquired by Apple, now all the functionality is available at the iTunes Connect. You can access all the backend functionality directly from the iTunes Connect portal. In particular, you can distribute the Beta version of your app to beta-testers (bth internal and external - the ones not members of you Apple developers team).

Pros:
  - Free.
  - Up to 1000 external testers.
Cons:
  - Functionality is rather limited, but you can get crash logs.

Crittercism

Criticism is probably the most advanced set of tools for remote diagnostics available. Very easy to integrate into an iOS app: it literally takes a couple of lines in the code. At the same time, you receive very detailed diagnostics date even without implementing BreadCrumbs.

The Dashboard provides an abundance of tools.



Advanced analytics is available.

Pros:
  - Good support and broad community.
  - Available for iOS, Android and Windows 8. http://docs.crittercism.com/integration/integration.html
  - Integration with GitHub, Jira and many others.
  - Very easy to install and integrate.
Cons:
   - Not free for advanced diagnostics.

Google Analitics

Unfortunately, I can't say much about Google Analitics because I didn't have a chance to test it yet. However, I have to mention it because this is quite popular and functional tool that provides real-time results. You can read more about it here .

Pros:
  - Results in the Dashboard appear in real time.
  - The SDK is free.
Cons:
  - Not that I know of.

Flurry

Flury is a multipurpose set of tools developed by Yahoo. Strictly speaking, it is not ment for remote debugging your mobile app, but is a nice choices for getting app metrics and logging errors and can be used to analize user actions.

The SDK is really easy to integrate into your app.

Pros:
  - Free.
  - Easy to integrate with your code.
Cons:
  - It can take few hours for a Flurry event to appear on the web console.