

Google Mobile App Analytics Public Beta Launch - fmela
http://analytics.blogspot.com/2012/10/mobile-app-analytics-updates-and-public.html

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rogerbinns
Has anyone used their new variables stuff? The whole custom variables thing
was ludicrously complex. Google's competitors just let you supply a JSON
object with each event so you could add whatever you wanted. Google also
bafflingly would only show the average value of numeric variables which is
beyond useless.

Hopefully they also fixed the major problem with their previous analytics
library which was that it only supported one reporting id at a time. (Under
the hood it would correctly work with multiples but the API ensured a
singleton for the top level "tracker" which then forced only one id.) This
causes problems if you have multiple libraries or components who want to do
their own reporting.

The previous mobile libraries were very much the minimal work to pretend they
worked like web sites, which really doesn't work well. I wrote about this at
[http://blog.appington.com/2012/08/13/technical-
differences-m...](http://blog.appington.com/2012/08/13/technical-differences-
mobile-app-analytics-are-not-web-analytics/)

~~~
fmela
As announced at Google I/O, app tracking is now a first-class citizen in
Google Analytics. The old SDKs used web tracking concepts, but now anybody can
use the new SDKs and the new reports, which are designed just for mobile apps.

To answer your questions, the new App Analytics SDKs (Android and iOS) support
multiple reporting IDs. The new custom variables are essentially named
dimensions and metrics that can persist for the duration of a session, and are
much simpler to work with than the custom variables in the old SDKs.

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bennyg
Yes. I hate my app having "pages" as the analytical tracking medium and using
"page-views" to quantify it. I wanna' measure more.

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nosecreek
Now if only they had an iOS app to view the data...

