The importance of app analytics

How developers get your data — and how they (should) use it.

When you’re a developer and your wish is to create a meaningful, desirable piece of software for its users, it is important to know what they think and how they act, and unfortunately, reviews on an app store aren’t enough. Usually driven by surges of emotion (be it blazing anger or blissful gratitude), reviews aren’t very accurate in defining lots of subtle flaws in your application, as well as not always making clear the strong points about it. This is where a certain player comes into action, the app analytics: tools that provide a mean by which a company or a developer can gather information about its applications usage.

Tools like Flurry, Localytics, Distimo and Countly aid developers in the aforementioned tasks in different ways. Gathering data from different sources (App Stores, as Distimo does, or directly from app usage, like Flurry does), they give their customers a way to visualize the gathered information in a structured format, as well as allowing exporting and combination of data, for more elaborate analysis criteria. There are even apps (like Heatmaps) which produce a “heat map” of your applications, showing the regions where user interaction occurs more often, often leading to the discovery of possible design flaws in the analysed product.

Right now, you may be asking yourself “And how can this information be important? Are these tools really that useful?”, and I can tell you for sure: app analytics are among the most efficient ways of gathering meaningful information about how are features being used, (and I’m just playing safe by not saying it’s THE most efficient way) being a must-have for any serious mobile software producing company.