Overview
appAnalytics is a tracking and reporting solution for applications build on the Adobe AIR® platform. While the solution itself is very young (hence it is still in beta) the tracking and data collection capabilities are already very sophisticated, providing a wealth of easy to understand data to help both developers and marketers fine-tune their applications.
The solution itself is a set of native Adobe AIR® Flex/Flash library classes that allow developers to quickly tag items within their applications for inclusion into reports. There are standard tags, actions, types and descriptions and within these, specific groupings to allow for easy top-line reporting. The solution has recently been re-written from the ground up to allow for future extensibility of tags and reporting groups as well as extensive support for custom types.
This means that developers can now include appAnalytics code in their applications without concern that they will have to recompile and re-release at a later stage. The re-architected SWC allows self-updates allowing for the solution to grow in sophistication without impacting development team resources or creating additional release cycles.
Our goal with this most recent release has been to make the solution as flexible as possible. We now have granular ability to allow customers to shutdown online reporting for specific periods of time, additional security measures to protect the integrity of captured data and an abstraction to ensure customer privacy.
The key features of the current solution are outlined at a high-level below.
Online/Offline Capabilities
As AIR® applications can be used in an offline environment we have built appAnalytics to cope with this situation. Unlike other solutions/hacks out there, appAnalytics will keep tracking your application offline for a customized period ensuring you don’t have gaps in your reporting. The amount of tracking performed offline is customizable at an application level so that developers can set realistic row limits to prevent their application performance degrading.
Installs
appAnalytics can tell you exactly how many times your application has been installed, when it was installed, what versions were installed, what OS it was installed on and much more.
Application Uses
appAnalytics can tell you how many times instances of your application were used, when, where and for how long. Our reporting suite is currently being updated to allow for segmentation based on data that is being captured, but not yet displayed (e.g. session times and geographical location).
Unique Uses
This gives you the exact number of application uses; think of this as the application equivalent of unique visitors.
Operating System
appAnalytics allows you to see which operating systems your application is running on. The data that is being captured currently includes full system specifications of the client machine including screen size and other system level information. We will be shortly exposing this data in the reporting suite allowing for segmentation based on richer data about individual customers.
Custom Types
We understand that no application is the same so we have made appAnalytics as flexible as possible; allowing developers to create as many custom tracking types as they desire. We even dynamically create a short cut in the reporting suite so you can get direct access to custom types without having to drill down on the data.
Error Tracking
No one wants to hear it, but it is always apart of application development. Our flexible type system has allowed us to create an error type that means if an error occurs in your application you can track out and be pre-warned before getting user feedback.
We are working hard to incrementally improve appAnalytics and value any feedback on the solution.
Any Questions?
Press inquiries, opportunities, general questions, comments, and concerns should be sent to Paul Sanderson the company founder, via email.
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