Flurry Blog

We looked at a lot of solutions for tracking in iPhone apps. We tried Flurry (http://www.flurry.com/) for a while, but they wouldn't give us access to our raw event data. After more investigation, we decided to go with Mixpanel. Their web interface is great for answering quick questions and we can export all the raw event data whenever we need to more heavy analysis.

Flurry's hiring Java developers in San Francisco or New York City. Mobile application development experience a plus (especially iPhone or Android), Hadoop experience a big plus. We could also use a great ops guy. http://flurry.com or just e-mail me - greg at the domain you'd expect it to be at.

I didn't know that app analytics was such a big business. Is this because you recently acquired distimo and you are cutting the slack? Sounds interesting, how much do you think you would be willing to sell it for? I am not sure I am really interested in buying it really. How does it compare to some of the competitors: http://www.flurry.com/ or http://www.localytics.com/ or http://www.mixpanel.com/ or http://www.upsight.com/? "It's hard to sell it, but I think it will allow me to focus on other areas a bit better." What do you plan to work on next?

I love the idea that we can make web apps just as successful as native apps, but the reality seems to be the opposite. Mobile web usage went from 20% to 14% according to flurry from 2013 to 2014. That trend could be reversed with a new movement towards the web, but it seems like it would take quite a trend reversal. We're stuck with apple- and google- based rent seeking platforms. http://www.flurry.com/bid/109749/Apps-Solidify-Leadership-Six-Years-in…

This post from flurry [1] suggests that a big chunk of revenue is going to a small proportion of very successful developers (there was a HN post about which companies they were but I can't find it now). That said it also suggests that revenue is increasingly moving down the long tail which may be a sign small app companies may become more viable. [1] http://blog.flurry.com/bid/88014/The-Great-Distribution-of-Wealth-Acro…

If you follow through to the article's source (Flurry - http://blog.flurry.com/bid/63907/Mobile-Apps-Put-the-Web-in-Their-Rear… ), they split out the mobile usage by activity. It is 47% games, 32% social.

In general, if you want to make any real money from iOS, make your app free and have users unlock features with in-app purchases. The cost of gaining wide adoption of free applications is very low and you'll find your conversions once they start using the app are much higher than price changing strategies. You also have the option to break down the pricing into smaller pieces (have a few $0.50 upgrades instead of paying $2 for the app). If you have more specific questions about the kind of app/genre I'm happy to answer them. My company (http://flurry.com) specialize in mobile application analytics and marketing.

Ahh, I see, you're looking more for a flurry type thing: http://www.flurry.com/ Lots of the Atlanta Shops use that.

I seem to remember that Flurry published some aggregated analytics to their customers. You should check with them: http://flurry.com

It doesn't necessarily solve RoAS tracking either. If you only have information on some % of your purchasers* and you optimize against that small, self-selecting sample, you may entirely miss other groups of higher spenders who just don't want to be tracked. It might help answer the question "which campaigns are performing better relative to each other" as long as we assume that no campaigns are more likely to affect opt-in rates than others. It may even be an improvement over up-front consent seeking, if the theory is that a better checkout UX with less upfront annoyances results in better opt-in rates later on. But it doesn't really answer the bigger question of "is this the best place to spend my marketing dollars" vs, say, investing in campaigns/platforms that may have greater reach but less transparent funnels (comparing a Google Ad to a Superbowl TV ad, for example). If you use this in a vacuum without any statistical modeling thought, you end up optimizing against algorithmic limitations rather than real customers. At the end of the day you're drastically reducing your sample size, and not in a representative, random manner. Your opt-in users are behaviorally different from the majority of people, and it wouldn't be a good idea to make big decisions based on their actions alone. They are essentially a cheaper focus group, with all the pros and cons of such. (*Probably a very low percentage, if the recent iOS tracking opt-in is any indication. One analysis says <15%…

iOS users continue to purchase more apps, and pay for more expensive apps, than their Android counterparts, despite the gulf in overall sales and user figures: http://www.distimo.com/blog/2011_12_distimo-releases-full-year-2011-pu… In 2011 iPad app revenues alone topped Android Market revenues by a significant margin. edit: some more recent sources: http://www.appannie.com/game-of-phones/ http://blog.flurry.com/bid/85911/App-Developers-Signal-Apple-Allegianc… "Running a comparison of revenue generated by top apps on both iOS and Android, Flurry calculates that the difference in revenue generated per active user is still 4 times greater on iOS than Android. For every $1.00 a developer earns on iOS, he can expect to earn about $0.24 on Android. These results mirror earlier findings from similar analysis Flurry conducted in Q4 of 2011 and Q1 of 2012."

Thanks so much for the feedback. Always nice to get a counterpoint to the sunshine and roses you hear from friends, family and the like. Regarding: a) Performance. Very disappointing to hear that you are experiencing lag. We did extensive device testing on iPad 1, and while we can't get the app to perform like it does on iPad 2 (SJ wasn't kidding about 7x graphical performance on the iPad 2), we did think we had gotten it to a stable, smooth operating state for the original iPad. Sounds like that's not the case for you. Would you be willing to let us know whether you downloaded the free or the paid version? And what version of iOS are you running? We'd love to address any issues you're seeing, but any further info you can provide is very helpful for any fine tuning. b) Music. It's a funny thing, very much a matter of taste. My kids (age 2,4) love the music. In fact, the three of us had a huge dance party to the Brahms piece from the app to celebrate launch. Sorry it's not your thing. We would have loved to include some music from Philip Glass, but we couldn't work out the licensing. Any suggestions on what you would like to hear? c) In-App Purchase. Very familiary with your sentiment regarding IAP. That said, the freemium model seems here to stay - see for example: http://blog.flurry.com/bid/67748/Consumers-Spend-Average-of-14-per-Tra… And while there is a (vocal) group of folks that don't like this model, there…

Samsung seem to have really gored the Apple community's oxen by having the temerity to challenge the iPad with "a big phone" and an Android phone at that. This guy's estimating 225 thousand sales total and getting featured on Daring Fireball. This app stats & analytics company on the other hand saw 0.9 million activated in December alone, basically tied as the second best selling android device. http://blog.flurry.com/bid/54035/Android-Special-Report-Is-Samdroid-th… Since Samsung originally thought they were going to sell a million in the last three months of 2010, then upped that target to 1.5 million I'd say they were doing okay. Personally I have no need for a 3G tablet, since I already have a phone I'm paying for data on and could tether, but those in the market for such a thing seem to like it as much as or more than the iPad. I did the research because I consider buying one to use as a jumbophone (this capability was removed for the US market) but it was just slightly too big for me. I'll settle for one of the next generation of 4.5-5 devices (and probably a cheap Tegra2 wifi tablet as well).

Orignal source: http://blog.flurry.com/

>Most people don't care. Most people aren't given the choice. When they are actually presented an equally simple decision between more privacy and less privacy, nearly everyone chooses privacy.[0] Making privacy just as easy as not-privacy is exactly what needs to happen, and that is likely to only happen through regulation. We can already see how hard companies work to avoid complying with GDPR and the cookie law. [0] https://www.flurry.com/blog/ios-14-5-opt-in-rate-att-restricted-app-tr…

This point is wrong: “Nearly all iOS users opted out of tracking” It’s 86%, not 96% as mentioned in the linked article: https://www.flurry.com/blog/ios-14-5-opt-in-rate-att-restricted-app-tr…

And they changed permissions to opt in. Different numbers for different categories, but I've read anywhere between 18 - 25% on the higher end opt-in success. But above example of weather app is a good trick though, probably gets more allow always on location than FB for instance. https://www.flurry.com/blog/att-opt-in-rate-monthly-updates/?__s=bht9z…

Direct source: https://www.flurry.com/blog/ios-14-5-opt-in-rate-att-restricted-app-tr…

Flurry is a mobile analytics product. App developers include the Flurry SDK in their apps to get insight about their audiences. The SDK also gathers information about devices, including the status of the ATT setting on iOS devices. Flurry gets all this data from users of apps that have the Flurry SDK in them. https://www.flurry.com/analytics/

I'm very curious how this works, so this is from a report [0] from Flurry Analytics, "owned by Verizon Media, is used in over 1 million mobile applications, providing aggregated insights across 2 billion mobile devices per month" How is Flurry Analytics measuring app tracking on iOS devices? Are they just reporting how much they themselves are being disabled? [0] https://www.flurry.com/blog/ios-14-5-opt-in-rate-att-restricted-app-tr…

Source: https://www.flurry.com/blog/ios-14-5-opt-in-rate-att-restricted-app-tr…

Curious if you're aware that mobile web usage dropped from 14% to 8% from 2014 to 2016[0]? And that according to Alex Russell[1], Google's internal telemetry has it well below 7% now. It seems to me that the opposite is true, that the irrelevance of the web on mobile will keep the web app versus mobile app division around essentially forever (web apps will be popular on desktop, and native apps on mobile). (Unless I was misunderstanding and you were saying, what's the difference? E.g., Facebook is Facebook, whether it's a web app or a native app.) [0]: https://www.flurry.com/post/157921590345/us-consumers-time-spent-on-mo… [1]: https://vimeo.com/364402896

From their site[0]: "Flurry sees 165B app sessions across 1.4B devices each month" so... even if Yahoo could turn each session into $0.05 of revenue, they could make it a $100b/yr business. 0: http://www.flurry.com/solutions/publishers edited for order of magnitude error

The Flurry stats [http://blog.flurry.com/bid/109749/Apps-Solidify-Leadership-Six-Years-i… show 32% of user time is spent gaming; 17% on facebook; 9.5% on messaging and 4% on youtube - that's 62% for those of you keeping count. That doesn't look like the end of the mobile web - that just looks like people spending a lot of time gaming and on facebook.

Checkout Flurry's Privacy Policy http://www.flurry.com/privacy-policy.html "The data collected by the agent may include.." Based on this the data sent to flurry's servers should not be that much. They should be also optimizing the size of data sent. Ofcourse you can always watch the data being sent using Charles to get a sense of the size of the payload.

Seems like flurry only gives age and gender data: http://www.flurry.com/flurry analytics.html#insight

Average app price: Android $0.06, iPhone $0.19, iPad $0.50. I'm picking this might be a part of it. Its just one data point but I've never seen anyone say that there is more money to be made on Android. http://blog.flurry.com/bid/99013/The-History-of-App-Pricing-And-Why-Mo…

Flurry includes age and gender info on several of their monetization posts: http://blog.flurry.com/default.aspx?Tag=Monetization

I'm confused. Having trouble reconciling: Slide 17: 26% of media consumption time is with Internet vs. 10% with Mobile (source: IAB) and separate stats from Flurry: 72 mins/day w Web Browsing vs. 94 mins/day w Mobile Apps (source: http://blog.flurry.com/bid/80241/Mobile-App-Usage-Further-Dominates-We… Has mobile not overtaken desktop Web yet?

Yes you and your techie friends care about this. Most people don't. Current trends indicate user attention is shifting even more to native, BTW: http://blog.flurry.com/bid/80241/Mobile-App-Usage-Further-Dominates-We… The web vs native debate is really just a debate about which technology is better suited to building cloud client apps. HTML5 + JS is just another UI stack like Cocoa Touch or Android.