Thursday, November 5, 2009

Google Implements Analytics for Android and iPhone

Yep. The SDK and documentation is here. This is pretty cool, but I'm currently using Flurry, and I'm extremely happy with their data and visualization. I may go ahead and use Google Analytics on my next app to see how things compare.

In other news, two sites that I used to rely on heavily to track the status of my apps have been down for a week. Cyrket is a site that provided an up-to-the-minute snapshot of the Android Market. It now directs to a blank page. Speculation in the dev forums indicates that Google may have changed something on their end that screws up the way Cyrket was scraping the information. Not sure if that's true or not, but I hope it's only temporary. In forum posts where people are asking about Cyrket, usually the first response is always, "just use AndroLib". AndroLib is okay. There are a couple of problems with it. One, it's much slower to update, as in days. Two, it doesn't display rank information just as the Android Market does. You can sort apps by date or by rating (which is kind of nice...the Android Market doesn't have this function), but you can't see a view of apps based on their current ranking (at least that I can tell). Want to find out what the #1 ranked app in a given category is? You'll have to actually go to the Android Market on your phone. Lame.

The other site that's currently down is AndroidStats. Actually, it's not completely down, it just hasn't updated with new data for a week. From what I've heard, AndroidStats gets its data via Cyrket, so since it went down, they both went down.

This wouldn't be a big deal if Google had a decent web interface to the market that displayed this information. One could possibly hope that the change they made might be related to implementing their own decent web interface to the market. We'll see. They've been pretty good about consistently updating Android itself, but not so much its web presence.

Another issue: I got an email today from a customer who had purchased Dominoes. She loved it, and wanted to give it as a gift to a friend. She asked that I simply charge her credit card again and send him a copy. Only problem is, I can't do that. And the Android Market doesn't currently support gifting apps. So I told her she could either buy him a gift card to let him buy the app on the market, or we could do an end around the Android Market via PayPal and email. Neither option is great. I have read that Google is considering adding this option. I really hope they do...it could only increase sales.

So, daily movements: Golf Solitaire has dropped back down to #4, but Dominoes keeps inching up...it's currently #8.

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