Analytics

[carloscosta]

Hi.

I never put any kind of analytics on my apps, trusting only on google and apple tools to track my apps bugs and info.

Do you guys suggest any service to provide a better understanding of my apps? I looked at Flurry and it looks what I need and want. it works great with Corona? Is Google Analytics better? On the marketplace, there are so many that I don’t know what to choose from.

I just need a tool to track my bugs and see when a user go to some scenes.

Regards,

Carlos.

[agramonte]

In order of my preference and why:

1. Flurry: My favorite feature is the individual user event logs. I can’t find it on any other analytics package. It shows the events in order for a user for one session. I don’t have to create funnels. For example, recently I found out that a large percentage of first-time players would see the request to login to facebook and would simply close the app (and never come back). Removing the request to log in for first-time users has improved my retention. Not the real events name but just an example:

a. event_launch

b. event_firstgameever

c. event_requestFacebookLogin

d. event_closeApp

2. Fabric: In my humble opinion their crash reporting is better than Flurry. Flurry misses crashes. Also, I don’t have to use a script to upload the files needed. Sadly the only Fabric plugin available doesn’t work very well on Android (crashes the app for anything but crash reporting).

Fabric (via Twitter), Firebase, and Facebook have also cross-referencing information about your users (age, gender,  and other interest). Although I find the data very interesting, I have still not figure out how to use it to make any more money.

Anyway, this is what my experience has been.

Adrian

[remiduchalard]

Create your own. I have try many but no one provide everything you need. If you look something specifics you can’t do sql request and/or analyse them with a script.

All analytics I know are only good to know how many time the app is open, the time spend, level done and a few others informations.

[carloscosta]

@agramonte, thanks for sharing your experience.

You said Flurry misses crashes? what you do mean, it doesn’t catch all the crashes or doesn’t support at all?

i read about crash report here:

https://developer.yahoo.com/flurry/docs/analytics/crash/

Corona plugin, doesn’t have access to crash reports? ou they are just worst than Fabric crash reports?

Fabric, like you said, it crashes a lot. I just read it in other posts about it. I can’t use a plugin if it will crash the app. the point of having this kinda of plugins is to minimize crashes not to add more crashes.

Thanks again for your input,

Carlos.

[carloscosta]

@remiduchalard, I can create my own, in fact, it was my first thinking, but before I go that route, and watching marketplace with full of plugins that could do what I want, I just asked here the opinion of other users that are using them with success. it’s never too much to share experiences. Thanks for your input also.

Regards,

Carlos.

[agramonte]

Misses some of them. For example, on Fabric it says my app is 98.6% crash free, but on Flurry, it states my app is a little higher than that. If I look at the actually crashes Flurry does not seem to report the corona splash screen crash (I don’t own the plugin) but Fabric does:

-[AppDelegate hideSplashScreen] + 485215

The fabric plugin also gives you hints (flurry does not) if it knows why the crash is occurring. So for this error, for example, it lets me know that corona splash screen crash:

Based on the stack trace displayed here, it looks like new calls triggering OpenGL rendering took place while the app was transitioning to, or from, a background state. If you set up OpenGL drawing in your app delegate’s methods, make sure that you only did so in applicationDidBecomeActive:, never in application:willFinishLaunchingWithOptions: or application:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:.

Fabric will also send you real-time alerts if a percentage of users are getting an error. Together with those alerts and some insight and the patcher plugin you can fix a bug that slipped by very quickly.

I like Flurry a lot. I am also part of their beta testers for new features and some of the new features are really cool and easy to use. No idea if they’ll ever make it out of beta and then into corona plugin.

As far as Fabric and the other thread, I don’t know about all that is being said there. But my experience has been that as long as you don’t send Answers events you don’t get that many crashes on iOS. On Andriod, 1 Answer event will result in 1 Crash. So for every event that you want to send in, you will also get 1 crash report (the event will not get written).

[agramonte]

And yes you can create your own but I’ll share my experience as part of a very very small team (2 people):

1. I would rather spend my time creating the game than dealing with re-creating something that is cheap or free. Even if the free version doesn’t meet 100% of my perceived need.

2. If you plan to have ads. I have in the past 3 years been offered and accepted 2 “direct deals” for certain demographics and countries. They were significantly more lucrative them displaying ads from AdMob and these companies were not interested in looking at my homegrown excel spreadsheets and Mongo databases (although I think they are nice). They wanted a way for either to have web access or API access to a major analytic provider. Both were even ok with Appodeal access.

[agramonte]

In order of my preference and why:

1. Flurry: My favorite feature is the individual user event logs. I can’t find it on any other analytics package. It shows the events in order for a user for one session. I don’t have to create funnels. For example, recently I found out that a large percentage of first-time players would see the request to login to facebook and would simply close the app (and never come back). Removing the request to log in for first-time users has improved my retention. Not the real events name but just an example:

a. event_launch

b. event_firstgameever

c. event_requestFacebookLogin

d. event_closeApp

2. Fabric: In my humble opinion their crash reporting is better than Flurry. Flurry misses crashes. Also, I don’t have to use a script to upload the files needed. Sadly the only Fabric plugin available doesn’t work very well on Android (crashes the app for anything but crash reporting).

Fabric (via Twitter), Firebase, and Facebook have also cross-referencing information about your users (age, gender,  and other interest). Although I find the data very interesting, I have still not figure out how to use it to make any more money.

Anyway, this is what my experience has been.

Adrian

[remiduchalard]

Create your own. I have try many but no one provide everything you need. If you look something specifics you can’t do sql request and/or analyse them with a script.

All analytics I know are only good to know how many time the app is open, the time spend, level done and a few others informations.

[carloscosta]

@agramonte, thanks for sharing your experience.

You said Flurry misses crashes? what you do mean, it doesn’t catch all the crashes or doesn’t support at all?

i read about crash report here:

https://developer.yahoo.com/flurry/docs/analytics/crash/

Corona plugin, doesn’t have access to crash reports? ou they are just worst than Fabric crash reports?

Fabric, like you said, it crashes a lot. I just read it in other posts about it. I can’t use a plugin if it will crash the app. the point of having this kinda of plugins is to minimize crashes not to add more crashes.

Thanks again for your input,

Carlos.

[carloscosta]

@remiduchalard, I can create my own, in fact, it was my first thinking, but before I go that route, and watching marketplace with full of plugins that could do what I want, I just asked here the opinion of other users that are using them with success. it’s never too much to share experiences. Thanks for your input also.

Regards,

Carlos.

[agramonte]

Misses some of them. For example, on Fabric it says my app is 98.6% crash free, but on Flurry, it states my app is a little higher than that. If I look at the actually crashes Flurry does not seem to report the corona splash screen crash (I don’t own the plugin) but Fabric does:

-[AppDelegate hideSplashScreen] + 485215

The fabric plugin also gives you hints (flurry does not) if it knows why the crash is occurring. So for this error, for example, it lets me know that corona splash screen crash:

Based on the stack trace displayed here, it looks like new calls triggering OpenGL rendering took place while the app was transitioning to, or from, a background state. If you set up OpenGL drawing in your app delegate’s methods, make sure that you only did so in applicationDidBecomeActive:, never in application:willFinishLaunchingWithOptions: or application:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:.

Fabric will also send you real-time alerts if a percentage of users are getting an error. Together with those alerts and some insight and the patcher plugin you can fix a bug that slipped by very quickly.

I like Flurry a lot. I am also part of their beta testers for new features and some of the new features are really cool and easy to use. No idea if they’ll ever make it out of beta and then into corona plugin.

As far as Fabric and the other thread, I don’t know about all that is being said there. But my experience has been that as long as you don’t send Answers events you don’t get that many crashes on iOS. On Andriod, 1 Answer event will result in 1 Crash. So for every event that you want to send in, you will also get 1 crash report (the event will not get written).

[agramonte]

And yes you can create your own but I’ll share my experience as part of a very very small team (2 people):

1. I would rather spend my time creating the game than dealing with re-creating something that is cheap or free. Even if the free version doesn’t meet 100% of my perceived need.

2. If you plan to have ads. I have in the past 3 years been offered and accepted 2 “direct deals” for certain demographics and countries. They were significantly more lucrative them displaying ads from AdMob and these companies were not interested in looking at my homegrown excel spreadsheets and Mongo databases (although I think they are nice). They wanted a way for either to have web access or API access to a major analytic provider. Both were even ok with Appodeal access.