How to Integrate a Mobile App Analytics Tool

2. Crash Reporting & Error Logging

Ideally, as an app owner or developer, you want to have every bug or crash fixed, and that’s why you need to know about each time a user gets an error. Tracking this manually might be very time-consuming, and that’s where crash analytics tools come into play. They give you a better understanding of what kinds of bugs your users experience, all sorted by the app version and time so that you can prioritize which bugs to fix first.

Some tools, such as Firebase, can even send you a push notification in case there’s a rapid rise in the number of issues.

3. Mobile Apps A/B Testing

Another interesting analytics use case is A/B Testing. Let’s imagine that your designers have created two versions of the same screen, but you’re really struggling to choose as they both look equally great.

In that case, you might want to choose the one that your users would like more. A/B testing tools manage to estimate that by dividing users into groups at random and showing one version of the screen to one group, and another version to the other. It then tracks any relevant statistics about the two screens and gives you an overview to help you make a better decision.

For example, below you can see how A/B testing works when deciding the color of a button and finally leads to a rise in sales.

• Real-time overview. Firebase can also give you real-time data about how many users currently have the app opened, their geographical location, most used app version, etc. Here’s how it looks:

• Audiences. Firebase also allows you to split your users into audiences, and track each audience separately. This is useful when you care more about the experience of a specific group of users. For example, you might create an audience of people who have made a purchase.
• A/B testing. Firebase also allows you to set up A/B testing for your apps, which looks like this:

Pros:

• Has almost all the most important analytics features: crashlytics, event tracking, A/B testing, real-time data
• Works for both mobile apps and websites
• Has a great free plan
• Is part of the whole Firebase ecosystem, making it easier to integrate other Google’s services with analytics. For example, you can set up Firebase Cloud Messaging (push notifications) to send data to the analytics module, thus showing how many users open the notifications you send

Cons:

• For large apps, the pricing might get high, as Firebase has the “pay-as-you-go” model, meaning that the more user events your app sends, the more you’ll have to pay
• Lacks some visualization techniques, such as heatmaps.

Mixpanel

Another popular analytics tool is Mixpanel. The functionality here is more limited, but it still offers the most important features needed for analytics, such as tracking events, user engagement and retention.

One of its advantages over Firebase is that it allows you to compare different metrics better. For example, Firebase considers iOS and Android versions as different apps, making it harder to compare their performance, but Mixpanel allows you to put the data from the two platforms side-by-side. In the following screen we can see how the iOS version has a significant drop in conversions:

Pros:

• Has a nice free plan, and relatively cheap paid ones (starting at $25/month)
• Has powerful visualization options & data filters
• Has A/B testing
• Works with both mobile platforms & the web

Cons:

• Has a steep learning curve when it comes to setting up the events
• Lacks user acquisition analytics

UXCam

UXCam is another popular tool that is especially good at visualizing the data received from the apps. For example, it offers heatmap analytics that looks like this:

UXCam also does a great job at visualizing screen flows, i.e. typical journeys of users through the screens, along with the percentages of people that pass from one screen to another:

Pros:

• Event & conversion analytics
• Heatmaps
• Screen flow visualization
• Issue analytics
• GDPR-compliant
• Has integrations with Firebase, Amplitude, and Crashlytics

Cons:

• Only available for the mobile platforms
• The pricing isn’t transparent (you have to request it)

Amplitude

The last analytics tool we’ll cover in this article is Amplitude, which was called the #1 leader in product analytics by G2. Amplitude has most of the features you’ll ever need, coupled with great visualization of the data. For example, here’s a chart of user journeys:

To create Bluetooth logs. The app relies heavily on BLE connections, so we wanted to ensure that the developers see every possible error the users get. For this, Amplitude proved to be a good option, as it allows us to send error logs along with the events, and later see the logs in the dashboard.

📚 Firebase Analytics Implementation with Typescript

Note box: This section is going to deal with the technical implementation of analytics, so if you’re more interested in a general overview of analytics providers, feel free to skip this section.

Since the Sportplus App was built with React Native, we decided to go with react-native-firebase to connect to Google’s APIs. Yet, the problem was that this library doesn’t allow us to create nice TS typings, which means you’d basically have to log any types. To deal with this, we decided to create a custom system of typings that had the following form:

Code block (typescript):

Naturally, there were more types than this, but for the sake of simplicity, we’ll limit ourselves to this.

Then, we created a couple of helpers that wrap around rn-firebase’s functions and apply the types mentioned above. The most important helper is logEvent:

Now, all you have to do, is call this helper, and TS will automatically help you with the typings:

Finally, it’s a good thing also to set up logging all screen transitions, so that you can see which screens are visited most often. To do that with react-navigation, we can create a wrapper around NavigationContainer like this: