The Best Mobile App Analytics Platforms in 2018–2019

Researching mobile app analytics is typically a time-consuming and daunting task. Yet, it doesn’t need to be. Although there is an affluence of solid platforms to choose from, there are just a noteworthy few that give you a significant bang for your buck. It’s August, which means we’ve passed the halfway point of 2018, and platforms have already established themselves as the favorites of this year and next. In ten years, the quality of apps has changed drastically, and correspondingly UX standards have also greatly developed, thus tremendously impacting the need for, and competence of, mobile analytics tools.

Thanks to thorough research and comprehensive new reports like Gartner’s Market Guide for Web and Mobile App Analytics, we’ve handpicked the top mobile app analytics tools within the industry. With ‘analytics’ as the prioritized SDK by mobile professionals, we pulled recommendations from three nameable subcategories: quantitative app analytics, qualitative app analytics, and performance crash analytics. Remain ahead of the curve and secure your spot as a mobile front-runner, with this neatly packaged guide that saves you time on any further investigation.

Quantitative App Analytics

Through numeric data, quantitative app analytics analyzes metrics that give you hard aggregate insights on conversion rates, user actions, and usage trends. Putting everything into numbers, quantitative app analytics provides you with answers to questions regarding how many total users you have or length of an average user session. Here are five market leaders in the quantitative mobile app analytics field.

Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a great choice for mobile professionals when it comes to crunching a range of data points and understanding the overall user journey on desktop, mobile web, and mobile apps. It is codeless, which means that no code is required to track app metrics. Mixpanel is a market leader in regards to extensive event tracking and is utilized by top brands such as Ticketmaster, Intel, and Viber.

Features:

• Engagement Analytics
• Conversion Funnels
• Retention Analytics
• A/B Testing
• Automatic Insights

Firebase

Firebase is Google’s suite of tools for mobile developers. It works with other Firebase features so that you can measure everything in one central location, from your ad spend ROI to app crashes. There is one incredibly thorough dashboard where you can view all user behavior and cross-network campaign performance. Firebase app analytics supplies you with a variety of tools to develop your app on the platform. Additionally, you can export all of your raw data to BigQuery for custom querying.

Features:

• Crash Reporting
• Deep linking performance
• In-app purchase data
• Attribution
• In-depth audience segmentation

Amplitude

Amplitude concentrates on analytics that help startups pinpoint and address trends users’ in-app behavior. By utilizing audience segmentation, Amplitude clients can analyze their users based on various parameters (location, install source, etc.) and examine these groups through funnels, IAPs, and retention. Also included in its app analytics is access to behavioral cohorting and retention insights, which are key indicators to identifying specific types of user behavior that correlate to strong retention.

Features:

• Behavioral Cohorting
• Single-user analysis
• Funnels & Conversions
• Retention
• User paths

Localytics

From traditional app analytics to smart targeting and marketing automation, Localytics offers a variety of features. It’s easy to understand your users and their interactions with this platform, and you can take these metrics to great heights–for example, EyeEm was able to target users with high-risk churn rate and adopted personalized re-engagement campaigns, or and the NHL app managed to increase app revenue through in-app messaging campaigns.

Features:

• Sessions and Events
• Retention
• Attribution
• Uninstall Tracking
• LTV

Keen

Keen is a cloud-based app analytics platform that allows developers to stream, compute, and access all events through a single API. Keen offers companies the possibility to track complicated attribution, generate alerts, institute real-time analytics dashboards, among a variety of other solutions. With Keen, developers can remain flexible with customized infrastructure while giving users the best user experience possible.

Features:

• Event tracking
• Real-time analytics
• Attribution
• Full resolution queries
• Smart charts

Qualitative App Analytics

There’s quantity, and then there’s quality. Of course both have their unique attributes, but in the case of mobile app analytics, the quantitative edge can only be taken so far in measuring numbers. The qualitative realm tracks what quantitative can’t, the app’s user experience. Although relatively new to the sport, qualitative app analytics is a powerful team player on the app analytics field. Some might even say its the MVP of the whole team, as it enables mobile app professionals to probe their apps on the single-user and aggregate user level, gaining actionable insights into users’ behavior and app performance.

Appsee

Appsee is the premiere qualitative app analytics platform, and has helped set the stage for the qualitative movement. Continuing to reign as the market leader in the qualitative industry, Appsee has a vast assortment of valuable features, two of the most noteworthy being User Recordings and Touch Heatmaps. User session recordings automatically tag all user events and give an exhaustive visualization of each user’s in-app experience. Touch Heatmaps, on the other hand, provide information on an aggregate level showing exactly where and how users are interacting with each screen and if they face any UI struggles.

In addition to these dominant qualitative features, Appsee offers conversion funnels, crash recordings and symbolication, action cohorts, among many others to choose from, depending on your app analytics needs. Additionally, integration platforms are available so you can pair all your data together.

Features:

• User Recordings
• Touch Heatmaps
• Crash and ANR Recordings and Reporting
• Conversion Funnels with Drop-off Videos
• Retention and Engagement Analytics

Performance/Crash App Analytics

Crashes happen. It’s the unavoidable truth of a mobile app’s life cycle, and even the best of the best of the app world encounter the occasional upheaval. But no matter what, it’s how you deal with these crashes–be it monitoring, analyzing, reproducing, or troubleshooting–that dictate the future success or failure of your app. Here are two top mobile app analytics platforms for tracking and resolving in-app crashes.

Crashlytics

One of the most established crash solutions in the industry, Crashlytics is completely free and supports both iOS and Android. It prides itself on having highly detailed crash reports which take into consideration many factors, such as device, battery status, charge in progress, proximity sensor, wifi connection, and physical phone orientation. On an aggregate level, Crashlytics examines your crashes, and accordingly generates reports that display crucial issues and trends. An added bonus is that Crashlytics sends a friendly alert to its clients if any crash goes unresolved after a certain period of time.

Key Features:

• Comprehensive crash reports
• Real-time processing and alerts
• Smart charts on crash trends and insights

AppLink.io

AppLink.io provides precise information regarding crashes in your app, from the manufacturer to the connection type to the app version. With these distinctions, you’re able to delve further into keymetrics such as, the number of impacted users and the rate that crashes are occurring. Applink.io is compatible with iOS and Android apps, and the dashboard is also easy to use, helping you make sense of your app’s performance.

Features

• Crash reporting
• Conversion tracking
• Event reporting

Brief Synopsis

Choosing the right mobile app analytics platform is a nuanced process, but once you have the right ones in place, the difference will be enormous. Quantitative data, qualitative analytics, and crash reporting improve app performance and user happiness, which drive better mobile app results. Identifying critical UX/UI problems is key, and only by complementing traditional analytics tools with a session replay tool you will obtain deep insights into the user journey. Furthermore, these tools possess many features that can be utilized across departments further aiding in cross-team collaboration and communication.

Utilizing top platforms from these three analytics categories will provide you with the most holistic view of what’s happening in your app and allow you to visualize results on a comprehensive level, taking your app to a place of supreme optimization. Setting these tools into your strategic plan will improve user experience on an unparalleled level.

The Best Mobile App Analytics Platforms in 2018–2019 was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.