02-14-2012, 07:46 PM
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 | CrackBerry User Device(s): 9900 Carrier: Telus Pin: 286F996E | | Location: Ottawa Join Date: May 2008 Posts: 54 Likes Received: 0
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I know this thread is a bit old-ish but I have some potentially useful information about flurry.
Anyone can read up more on their website (google flurry analytics).
I have seen it used in some apps, and what it tracks (assuming they tell the devs the right information) is whatever the developers tell it to. It can track anything the app does. I may just be naive, but it seems like as an app developer it could be useful to provide usage statistics on your app.
The information given to the owner of the app is supposed to be non-identifying. Of course some evil company could log your passwords or worse, but they could write their own software to do that themselves anyway. The type of info is usually along the lines of, how many users per week are using my app? How total users have used my app? What tasks do they perform inside my app?
I think the user should be given a choice on whether or not to allow this. Some apps handle this differently. For example, one app might give you a bunch of permissions and say it requires this to function and most people allow it. Other apps request permission when required, so when the flurry module is about to report it would try to make a connection to flurry(dot)com and ask the user permission to access that site (not necessarily telling you WHY it need to access that site).
So it is basically like any website analytics tool (google has one). In a perfect world, it would only log useful information to the developer and marketing (to see what features are used most, or what demographic to target for example), and that information is non-identifying.
*note* I have not used it in any personal software, but I was asked to add flurry to an app I worked on for a company. I know what I say is biased, but the only information we gather is what features are used - we want to know which features we can deprecate or stop maintaining. Also it provides useful stats on how many people are on what OS version, which for blackberry is very important because some features we wanted to add are only available on OS 6+ etc.
Again, the only issue I have is that not every app will ask the user permission to track their usage, even if it is "anonymous".
edit: it makes sense that it would not show up as an application as flurry provides a JAR file containing the required cod file which is then bundled in a given app. Also useful to monitor unhanded exceptions in an application, and notify the developer so they can fix the problems.
Last edited by cmolson; 02-14-2012 at 07:52 PM.
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