Flurry Phone Fun... Flurry Analytics on WP7

Andy Pennell's Blog - Using Flurry Analytics on Windows Phone

"I recently added Flurry Analytics support to my application and in the few weeks it has been available I have learnt huge amounts about my users, their habits, and found and fixed several bugs that no-one has even reported.

[This post is my personal opinion as some guy producing Windows Phone apps, and should not be taken as any kind of Microsoft endorsement for this company or its products]

Flurry is an analytics engine that you add to your app and then it reports as much or as little as you would like it to about your app, within about four hours. It is very easy to use (its documentation consists of a tiny text file), it works very well, and its web site lets you grok the information in an easy to use way. Oh and it is totally free!

Getting Started

First off sign up on the site and you can register your application and get a unique key for it. Download the Windows Phone Flurry SDK and add a reference to their assembly in your project. Add a couple of calls to your Application class per their documentation and you already have the basics: you will now know how many new users you have, how long they use your app, in what country they are, what phone and what version they are using, and lots of other information. Those of us accustomed to the glacial performance of the App Hub system and web site, with its inexplicable reporting delays, will be especially pleased with all aspects of the Flurry system. Apart from the default data collection, the data that I find most important is ship-asserts and basic analytics.

Basic Analytics

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Flurry - Flurry Analytics

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Flurry Analytics delivers powerful insight into how consumers interact with your mobile applications in real-time. Over 60,000 companies have chosen Flurry Analytics to use in more than 150,000 applications across iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, JavaME and HTML5.

Flurry Analytics helps mobile application developers make better apps, deepen consumer engagement and improve monetization of their applications. The service is free, cross-platform, easy to integrate, able to handle data loads of any size application and frequently updated with new, advanced features.

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This is the first time I've heard of Flurry Analytics and I like its price point (free) and that it's cross platform, even HTML5. Check out the above tutorial, it looks pretty darn easy to use (maybe not as easy as an IL injection method, but maybe that also makes it more deterministic too). But what ever you do, you've got to add (and disclose) telemetry and analytics to your app's. Don't guess what your users are using, know.