Android app usage tracking

Question

Our Android application has many different settings. We want to simplify it and only keep visible the most used ones and hide others in some advanced mode. To do this, we need to know which settings are used mainly by our users. Therefore, we need to find a way to get application usage statistics.

The app contains Google Analytics (GA), so using GA for this is a natural choice. However, it seems that GA is more suitable for tracking events, rather than for permanent settings in the application. In other words, with GA, we could easily track when a user changes a single parameter value by tracking a click on a setting. But not what is the setting state.

All our settings are saved as general preferences, and this is basically a key / value pair template. No personal information. Is there an easy way to get these key / value pairs sent to us and collected so that we can easily see how most people configure our application, what settings are used and what is not used much?

Using GA, it seems that the only way to do this is to use custom dimensions. However, they are limited to 20 keys / value. We need a lot more.

Is there a way in GA or in another third-party SDK to track application usage statistics?

Thanks in advance for your understanding!

Answer 1

• Google Analytics events must be workable for what I hear, because there are 4 parameters for each event. For example, if you want to track a gender parameter that is currently set to female and changing to male, you can send the following event parameters:

  ('Gender', 'Female', 'Male', 1)

  Track the change from male to female as:

  ('Gender', 'Male', 'Female', 1)

  Then in GA reports you can see that the unique number of events for the first combination is, say, 50, and the combination for “Gender”, “Husband”, “Woman” is 30, then more people move from woman to man than vice versa .

  If you want to track a parameter with more than two parameters, just save the same template.

  ("SETUP NAME", "CURRENT SETUP", "CHANGE TO INSTALLATION", 1)

• If for some reason this does not work for you, Flurry also does free analytics for mobile applications, and events are set differently. They use 2 parameters, and the second can contain up to 10 key-value pairs.

EDIT . I highly recommend not using Flurry to track events because they are difficult / impossible to report in aggregates.