The Localytics Blog

Best Practices: Measuring App Sessions on iOS 4

Before Apple iOS 4, tracking mobile app sessions on iPhone was very straightforward. Only one app could run at a time and every app had a clearly defined starting and ending point. With the introduction of multitasking in iOS 4, apps are no longer terminated when a user exits but are instead moved to the background and resumed when the user returns. In fact, many apps such as music players and messaging clients are intended to persist in the background indefinitely without any defined stopping point. As a result, the old way of tracking app sessions no longer accurately reflects the users’ behavior.

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Localytics SDK Supports iPhone 4

Our engineers have jumped on each Apple developer release and ensured that our open source SDK is fully compatible with Apple's latest creations, iOS 4 and the iPhone 4. With people queued up around the world last night to be among the first to sport Apple's hot new device, mobile app publishers using Localytics are already gaining anonymous, valuable and accurate insight into iPhone 4 usage.

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New Feature Explored: Event Attributes

We are happy to announce the availability of new client libraries for Android, Blackberry and iPhone apps that support performance improvements and a number of new features. One feature I particularly want to highlight is Event Attributes. Developers have always been able to record events in their applications, but now in addition to recording events you can record attributes associated with the event. (More)

Should Android developers be targeting Android 2.0 and the Droid?

A year ago the Android ecosystem was pretty simple: there was one device, one operating system version, and developers knew exactly what they were building for.  Android has come a long way and today there are a number of Android devices available with many more expected.  One device that is now getting a lot of attention is the new Motorola Droid, which will be introduced on Verizon’s network tomorrow.  While this excitement bodes well for the future of Android, it leaves mobile application developers wondering how quickly the Droid and especially Android 2.0 will be widely adopted.  To explore this, we looked at the mobile application usage of 20,000 Android handsets over the last week to determine the breakdown of users by phone and by Android OS.  We have also used these data to make some predictions on device uptake over the next few months.

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How to reliably establish a network connection on any BlackBerry device

Establishing a network connection within a BlackBerry application is a challenge which tends to surprise developers new to the BlackBerry platform.  This is especially true for developers coming from another platform and expecting the ability to simply call Connector.open(url) and get back a connection to that url. This article explains why connecting to the internet on a BlackBerry device can be tricky and presents some of the popular ways of doing it along with the source code for our own solution.

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Developing For Smartphones: Setting Up Your Environment

Previously, we examined the business and technology concerns around building applications for each smartphone platform. Here we investigate the options for application development on each platform and what tools are are necessary to build them. 

Unfortunately there is no universal tool for app development.  For example, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile Development require a Windows Environment, where iPhone requires OSX.  The closest thing to a consistent application model supported on all the smartphones is a Webapp but these take completely different forms on a BlackBerry than on a Palm Pre.  Java developers with Eclipse experience have a bit of an edge because this covers BlackBerry, Android, Symbian, and JavaME.  Similarly, if the iPhone is not the target device then Windows is the operating system of choice because it allows some form of development on every other platform.

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Smartphone OS Wars: What platforms to develop for? Part II (Technology perspective)

Deciding which platform to develop on is not only a business decision (as described in Part 1) but also a matter of what technology is right for the project. Each platform provides a different set of tools and development concerns for the application programmer.  Below is a brief discussion of the major technology differences between the platforms which are relevant to a developer:

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Five things to test for a better user experience in your Android application

As the Android Market starts to pick up steam we are seeing lots of exciting applications come out of the woodwork. Unfortunately, the newness of the platform coupled with the desire to be first to market with a particular idea has also brought about a lot of application bugs which cause otherwise great programs to get some bad ratings in the Android market.

The following is a list of five things, which while certainly not all-inclusive, can be tested in five minutes and will help avoid some of these bugs and the negative feedback they bring

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