Flurry

Flurry is arguably the most widely used app analytics tool. It is quick to integrate and best of all free. Flurry Analytics is free at any scale and available for iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, and mobile web. Flurry is also simple to use as it does not try to do everything. It is especially useful for first time experience of your users. You can also track your user acquisition marketing campaigns and link them back to the overall analytics to maximize your spend. Examples of analytics that can be tracked are a number of times a user brought up a specific view; a number of times a user tapped a button; time spent in a given view or in a specific activity within the app. It is not anyway near as extensive as an Adobe Analytics tool and nor is that the intention. The things you can use Flurry for: Sessions, New Users, Active Users, Session Frequency, Session Duration, Retention, Error and Crash Reporting. You can also benchmark your own App’s main metrics against how other apps are doing. You can benchmark your app’s Session Length, Frequency of Use and Retention against all Flurry clients. You can also just benchmark with the apps in your respective store category. Flurry's documentation is one of the best-written documentations in the industry and provides several examples of the use of the different method calls in code. After its buyout by Yahoo, Apps that have integrated the Flurry SDK immediately have an option to monetize their apps by including native and videos ads through Yahoo App Publishing. The process is like any other in-app advertising with the difference being that the ads are served by Yahoo.

The worst part of using Flurry is inaccurate reports and data. This is especially true of its SDKs for iOS. Many of the metrics are inaccurate. We could see that app purchasing figures were overestimated by 1000s of units when compared to iTunes. In addition, one major drawback of using Flurry is you providing your data for public scrutiny. As an app provider, this may not be among your best interests as you may want to protect your data. A lot of companies have migrated from Flurry because of this. Flurry also is weak on retention reporting. For instance, it doesn't provide cohort-based analysis or the ability to dive deep into your data. While it does focus a fair amount on user acquisition but doesn't have K-factor, so you can't assess your virality. Flurry also does not track unique users. Flurry works at an aggregation level. Hence, you can’t deep dive into an individual user.

Flurry is free. So, there is no harm trying it. You, at least, get some basic info for very low effort. They offer basic reports and some customization, but their business model is to sell mobile marketplace data & analysis. Having said that, Flurry does produce some really amazing insights about mobile apps.