Top Cost-Effective and Secure Analytic Tools for Mobile Applications (Android and IOS)

Deborah Oluwabunmi Joseph
8 min readMar 7, 2024

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image from www.applica.agency.com

What is mobile app analytics?

Mobile app analytics involves capturing, measuring, and examining user behavior using data collected from mobile platforms. This data, generated each time users interact with mobile applications, is analyzed to gauge the effectiveness of mobile platforms in prompting customers to take action. Analytics reports provide insights into user behavior, empowering you to make informed choices regarding app marketing and performance enhancements.

Why use mobile app analytics and tools?

After successfully developing and launching a user-friendly, high-performing, and scalable application, the possible next steps would be to start measuring the success and growth of the application.

App analytics tools are software tools used in monitoring app performance to get the data of users’ behavior and performance.
It helps to maximize your app usage and impact, enhance your app growth, grow the app users, and directly impact the revenue generated through the app. Furthermore, this would help reach more potential users, knowing what features of your app your users like, what keeps them in the app, what makes them stop using or uninstall your application, what prompts them to download the app, etc.

Typically, these analytical tools necessitate the installation of an SDK (Software Development Kit) into your app, and they are accessible to various teams within a startup or organization, such as the engineering, product management, design, quality assurance, and marketing teams, among others.

Things to consider when selecting an app analytic tool

There are many app analytics tools. To select the most suitable one, these are some things to consider;

  • Your app category and features.
  • What data do you need to analyze your app success e.g. user behaviour, demographics, no of installs, no of uninstalls, etc?
  • Compatibility with other tools used in the app.
  • Size of users.
  • Integration capabilities i.e. your tech stacks and need to integrate other tools in your app.
  • Cost: Pricing and plan.
  • Data privacy and security.

Some App analytics tools for Android and IOS

1. Google analytics for firebase

Google Analytics for Firebase provides free, unlimited reporting on up to 500 distinct events that can be defined using the Firebase SDK. The SDK automatically captures certain events and user properties, and you can define your custom events to measure the things that uniquely matter to your business. It is an app measurement solution, available at no charge, that provides insight into app usage and user engagement.
A mobile app event is an action performed by users within an app. An app event can be anything a mobile marketer or developer determines is helpful to measure. e.g New message >> open app >> message received >> post created >> profile updated >> app closed.

Event tracking is the method by which you gain insight into the activities occurring within your mobile applications.

screenshot of event page of firebase analytics

Features

  • Dashboard: It provides a detailed summary and insights about your data.
  • Real-time Analytics: It helps you understand user behavior and view live usage data with real-time reporting.
  • Audience Segmentation: Custom audiences are defined in the Firebase console based on device data, custom events, or user properties.
  • Custom definition: It shows a list of user properties defined in the app. You can use these properties in comparisons on many of the reports available in Google Analytics.
  • StreamView: This is used to show live and dynamic views of your app’s analytics data.
  • DebugView: This is used to validate your analytics instrumentation by visualizing the stream of events logged by your development devices.
  • It can also be integrated with other Google tools such as BigQuery, Google Data Studio, etc.

Setting up: https://firebase.google.com/docs/analytics/get-started?platform=flutter

2. UXCam App Analytics

This analytics tool is available in both free and paid versions, catering to both cross-platform and native applications. It’s particularly useful for making detailed decisions based on analytics data. With UXCam’s funnel analytics, you gain a comprehensive understanding of the factors influencing user conversion or drop-off. Access valuable context to refine your funnel and achieve improved results.

Features

  • In-depth behavior analytics: It includes detailed analytics, heatmaps, screen flow analysis, and funnel tracking, which can be used to understand user behavior.
  • Improve app performance through insights into potential user experience issues, alerting you to crashes, and UI freezes and handling exceptions that are easily preventable.
  • Understand user journeys: UXCam’s tracking capabilities allow you to see the complete user journey, helping you understand how users interact with your app and identify areas for improvement.
  • Customizable dashboards: UXCam’s customizable dashboards allow you to track the performance metrics that matter most to your app and easily understand how your app is performing.
  • User segmentation. It provides dynamic user segmentation capabilities, allowing you to tailor your app’s content and features to specific user groups.
  • It supports Integration with other tools and platforms.

More about UXCam: https://developer.uxcam.com/docs/flutter

Setup for flutter: https://developer.uxcam.com/docs/flutter

3. Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a free and paid (starts at $25/month for 1K users) analytics tool that allows you to track user interactions and build custom reports. It helps in evaluating user actions by segmenting them and by creating funnels. It can segment user actions and create funnels to understand user interactions in the app.

In addition to tracking user interactions, Mixpanel also provides information about data points such as location, device, and channels, which can give you insights into your users’ demographics and behavior. Overall, it is a good tool for understanding user behavior and optimizing your app for the best possible user experience.

Features:

  • Insights: It is a tool designed to visualize trends and compositions within your data.
  • Funnels: allows you to examine how end-users perform events in a series. It calculates and displays the number of users who convert from one event to another within a particular time window.
  • Flows: To identify the most frequent paths taken by users to or from any event.
  • Retentions: This helps to assess user engagement over a specified period.
  • Boards: Boards allow you to alter some aspects of the queries within each of the reports on that board, making it simple to ensure every report is showing results from a consistent set of data.
  • Impacts: Mixpanel’s Impact report measures the effects of product or marketing launches on your key metrics.

setup: https://docs.mixpanel.com/docs/tracking-methods/sdks/flutter

Flutter package: https://pub.dev/packages/mixpanel_flutter

4. Amplitude

Amplitude offers a comprehensive quantitative analytics tool available in both free and paid versions (starting at $2K/month). The free version allows tracking of up to 10 million user actions or events per month.

It tracks user actions, analyzes user behavior, and accesses accurate and real-time insights while highlighting what’s actionable. You can also use Amplitude to create custom reports and funnels to understand how users progress through your app and identify areas where they may be struggling or dropping off.

Utilizing its AI technology and tailored industry solutions like e-commerce, media, financial services, B2B, Healthcare, among others, this platform grants access to dependable product insights through automated reports. It enables you to grasp your user journey quickly with instant visualizations.

Features

  • Real-time app analytics.
  • Retroactive funnels.
  • User segmentation.
  • Scalable analytics.
  • Retention rate detection.

Setup: https://www.docs.developers.amplitude.com/data/sdks/sdk-overview/

5. Countly

County provides an overall analytics tool that offers a real-time, open-source mobile analytics application that can be hosted on your servers.

It tracks users’ behavior and provides a range of metrics and tools for understanding user actions. It offers a range of features for tracking user events, analyzing user demographics, and identifying areas for improvement. In addition, it offers customized products and solutions based on your app category and team.

Industry-specific solutions encompass Healthcare, Finance, e-commerce, Telecommunications, Tech SaaS, Education, Retail, and Customer Success teams. Team-specific solutions cover Product, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success.

Documentation and Integrations: https://support.count.ly/hc/en-us

https://support.count.ly/hc/en-us/sections/360007310512-SDKs

6. Glassbox

Glassbox provides paid digital experience analytics across mobile and web. It focuses on journey mapping but has many more features, listed below.

Glassbox automatically captures every user interaction and technical event from your native mobile app, giving you all the data you need to analyze the in-app experience.

screenshot of glassbox interaction map feature

Features

  • Interaction maps: This helps to understand how customers interact with each screen and element.
  • Funnel analysis: It can be used to create ad-hoc funnels to discover why drop-offs and deviations happen.
  • Journey analysis: It helps in visualizing app journeys on an interactive map with AI insights.
  • Crash analytics: Replicate crashes and understand what caused them.
  • Performance analytics: See how software, network, OS and device impact experience.
  • Version insights: View version adoption trends, response times and errors.
  • High compatibility: Operates seamlessly with Android, iOS, React Native, Flutter, Xamarin and more.
  • Ecosystem integration: Connect Glassbox with web analytics, APM, VOC and A/B testing tools.

7. Adobe Analytics

This app analytics tool is priced for enterprise clients only. Adobe Analytics provides real-time analytics and detailed segmentation that helps understand your users.

It provides a range of features for tracking and analyzing user behavior, including tools for understanding customer journeys, identifying trends and patterns, and measuring the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Adobe Analytics also offers a range of integrations with other Adobe products and third-party platforms.

It is suitable for both Android and iOS applications.

Features

  • Flow exploration.
  • Fallout analysis.
  • Custom histograms.
  • Cohort analysis.
  • Contribution analysis

To compare ranking and rating of different mobile app analytic tool, check this https://www.gartner.com/reviews/market/mobile-app-analytics

References

Thank you for taking the time to read this article. I trust it aids in understanding mobile app analytic tools and their diverse applications. Please show your appreciation by clapping and sharing your feedback. Additionally, feel free to connect with me on X(Twitter) and Linkedin.

Till next time✌️.

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