TomSoft

Know all about your app: Flurry analytics

April 29th, 2009

Flurry, an early developer of mobile mail client for J2me seems to be reborn as a great analytic tools. This tool is available for four platforms: J2ME, iPhone, Android and Blackberry.

I’ve tested the J2me and iPhone version, and it’s one of the best tool I’ve found so far. Before, I’ve used “mobileZoo” from Stephane, and do the job, but started to be slow.

Flurry follow the same principle: you get stats about your users, their mobile, where do they come from, but give you much more details:

• session length,
• http usage (number of requests, time spent/request, data downloaded and received)…
• number of canvas displayed
• etc…

One of the coolest feature, is the notion of “events”. You can track events within your app (with a maximum of 100 events).
In J2ME, adding events is dead simple: whe you upload your jar file, flurry introspect it and you can select which procedure you want to track. If your binary is obfuscated, you can send the mapping file generated by the obfuscator. And then, by miracle, all calls to a specfific function are send back to the server.

Here is an exemple of two events that I’ve added in the 8Motions app:

Want to know if this feature is used or not in your app? Want to know the user path within it, want to track error generated…All of this is possible quite easily.

What is missing: the good thing for J2ME is it’s not a library, but it’s also a bad thing. I can not regenerate a new binary without manual interaction with Flurry. I would like to see a lib, like the iPhone version, that could be embeeded n my J2me app during the build process. Also, this could be used to add more details to event reporting, like additional parameters (this s what is done in iPhone version).

But it’s a very good product, and I strongly recomment any serious developper to check Flurry !

Entry Filed under: iphone,JavaME,Wireless