Tracking user behaviour in an Android app

If your app asks the the INTERNET permission then I recommend that you embed an analytics library into your app right from the start. This will let you get near real time information about who is using your app and how they are using your app.

Adding an analytics library is easy. I use Flurry and at it's simplest you just add the following to each of your Activities:

    @Override
    public void onStart() {
        super.onStart();
        FlurryAgent.onStartSession(this, FLURRY_KEY_FOR_THIS_APP);

    }

    @Override
    protected void onStop() {
        super.onStop();
        FlurryAgent.onEndSession(this);
    }

This will give you all kinds of information about your users. Such as how many times is your app used per day and how much time do user's spend on it. And also in what order are different activities invoked and how much time ares user's spending on each Activity.

Subsequently you can start getting finer grained information by reporting on specified events, such as how times was a new game started and hence on average how many games are played in a single session by a user. This is a simple as adding the following as required.

FlurryAgent.onEvent("gameStarted");

You can even provide a Map of arbitrary parameters to be associated with the event.

final Map<String, String> params = new HashMap<String, String>();
params.put("score", getScore(jumble));
params.put("percentFound", getPercentFound(jumble));
params.put("wordsPerMinute", getWordsPerMinute(jumble));
FlurryAgent.onEvent("gameOver", params);

The event data has let me get a good understanding of how people are playing the game. And helped me tailor my development efforts so that I'm spending time improving areas that are of interest and relevance to my users. Don't get me wrong, direct feedback from user's is gold, but it's rare and it's the voice of a highly motivated individual, it may not reflect the vast majority, that's where the statistics provided by an analytic engine comes to the fore.

Overall the data from Flurry (and I expect any analytic engine) is more than 10 times as much information as is available via the Android Market. I just wish I had it embedded right from the beginning, because it's not entirely clear how many user's are still running old versions for which I have no info.