Mobile analytics, everyone jumps on the bandwagon (a list)

Posted in: Blog, Mobile by openhanced on February 1, 2010

Mobile analytics has gained attention because recently two companies that do analytics discovered usage of the Nexus One and more recently the iPad. When doing a search on the internet for “mobile analytics” a lot of companies will popup that offer a solution. At Openhanced we try to integrate and test a few of these into our Hybrid Mobile approach. Analytics are important and more companies should use them to exactly pinpoint where to put investments in new technology. Especially related to investing in mobile applications for your Enterprise.

In all these years in IT i’m still surprised by the fact that not many companies monitor usage when new web-, or mobile apps. are deployed. Because of the fact that much software is delayed people are mostly happy when the application finally is deployed, they are glad to have that behind them.

In my opinion this is not a good approach. Why would you invest in features of a product that nobody uses unless it is clear beforehand that the target group is small and they need this functionality.

It looks like measuring mobile sites is booming, there are at least 4 providers:

• Handsetdetection (API);
• Motally (API);
• Mobilytics (API);
• Percentmobile (API);
• Flurry (SDK);
• Localytics (SDK);
• Mixpanel (API).

Mixpanel
This is our favorite right now because it contains custom statistics (define your own). It also has an option to get to the RAW data by using an API.

Update: just as I say this their system is down, it seems they have some problems.

Handsetdetection
This is the first one we discovered and it has some neat features. The one that is interesting is the GEO location information. On top of their analytics they also offer GEO location and that is very useful for web apps. (a web app. cannot touch the GPS). Basically Handsetdetection is an API to determine which device is requesting the mobile site. We use this in a combination with JQTouch to render a web app. to the correct device.

You can see interesting details about carriers but also ISP’s.

Motally
We did not integrate Motally yet but it seems promising. It also has referrer information, something Handsetdetection does not have.

Mobilytics
Not tested yet.

Percentmobile
Invitation requested, not tested yet.

Flurry
This is an API the the form of a SDK. That means it cannot be integrated into a web app. They seem to have a very good reputation.

Localytics
This is also an SDK and we did not test it yet.