Service for tracking user's lifetime usage of the app

Hi,
I’m wondering if there is any service which tracks every users activity until the time when user deletes the app. By having this information, we could calculate the average lifetime usage of the app, and could make a right marketing decisions. Say, at what time to give interstitials(and how many times), send push or show the acceptance of TOS, and etc…

Thanks

Hi @Daler

There are several tools for that:

  • Google Analytics - if you configure it right it’s should answer most of your questions but it does not allow to act upon the data from within the same tool. Plus, unless you pay for it, it only analyzes a sample of your audience. But it’s a fantastic tool to start with.
  • Flurry, etc. - good tools as well but not fully real-time (if you need it)
  • back-end solutions like Parse - they also could help you a lot
  • <shameless plug> our Dataspin.io where you can analyze data on a very granular level, ie. user / device / tap / purchase / ad tap / etc. It also allows you to close the loop, ie. act upon the data you have, run and track campaigns and calculate measures like retention, LTV, MAU, DAU, ARPPU displaying all your revenue source on one screen.
    Ping me if interested :slight_smile:
    Cheers

@tom_dataspin.io,
Hi,
Actually if Im not wrong I’ve applied for your beta or no, I’m not sure. Probably not, because of I dont have a game.
What I really want is to track every user, not by region or by day(for this i have flurry). I want to know how many of their times they spend in my app and in what screen. How often during the day they use my app, and what would be that time, according to their timezone(maybe it is too advanced;)), and all that things that you’ve mentioned. If your service is able to provide it, I would be much appreciated to take a part on your beta. It is not a shameless if you tell about your service and it does provide a job that others can’t.
Thanks

Not to step on dataspin’s toes, but Flurry allows you to quite easily do things which could be used to do what you wish to some degree.

For example you can set up basic event tracking - for example button presses etc. - and on Flurry website you can then also see the “funnels” i.e. which path users took.

So when button 1 was pressed - after that which buttons were pressed and how often etc.

That type of stuff can be useful to see if some features you are adding are ever being used etc. (though in a way that could also be misleading because your elite group of users - or those who pay for the paid app could be the ones doing that and maybe a wanted feature by them even though overall statistics don’t suggest that very clearly).

But you can get an idea.

More complicated stuff can also be done - for example you can also set up some data to be sent to flurry servers with each event - and at Flurry dashboard you can see stats on that - so presumably you could do onResume() and onPause() - time used being sent to Flurry servers whenever you onPause() out of the app etc.

In my own experience I found that doing some of the more complicated stuff was giving some errors (as visible on Google Developer Console) - you know the ANRs or Java null pointer exception etc. type of stuff - which went away when I commented out the more complicated stuff.

But it can still be useful to turn it off occasionally.

So you COULD set up the more complicated Flurry stats as OFF by default - and have it turn on when a certain AppBrain Remote Setting flag is set true etc. This way whenever you are curious, you could turn that flag on - and a certain percentage of your users (those with internet etc. and which have updated the new AppBrain settings) will start reporting to Flurry. Then you turn off after you have gotten an idea of the stats - so you don’t have to expose your users to too many ANRs etc.

This is just my experience from use of Flurry - I don’t have experience with Google Analytics or other stuff.

@adforandroidapps,

As usual great reply. Thanks.

Did not know that using funnels will cause more errors. Anyway it is a good idea, but it needs own wrapper to be written, and as you mentions it gives some errors. I will leave my email for their Beta in dataspin. Will give a post about my experience, so lets see.

@tom_dataspin.io,
Hi,
I’ve applied for your Beta but didnt get any reply. Was that a joke? or you really can provide what you’ve been talking about here.
Thanks
P.S. just got an email from Tom…

I’m on Flurry now and can’t see any documentation regarding tracking capabilities.?

Analytics/GettingStarted - Flurry
Analytics/GettingStarted/Android - Flurry

Analytics/GettingStarted/Events - Flurry
Analytics/GettingStarted/Events/Android - Flurry

Analytics/Overview/Lexicon/FunnelAnalysis - Flurry

This is with flurry some 6 months back - they may have made things more stable now.

What I meant by “more errors” when using the more advanced event tracking/funnel features of Flurry was that - one saw some more errors in Google Developer Console. I removed these advanced features (I think I had it then setup so I could turn them on with AppBrain Remote Settings if I wanted to track those things again).

They may have fixed their SDK so these relatively rare errors occur less often.