Why statistics matter

To know how often the pages of your app are viewed or which feature is used the most is hugely important. It lets you know how to improve your app, and more importantly what to improve in priority.

Roman Nurik, Android Developer Advocate at Google pointed out this need in this post about « Improving App Quality ».

As he says, statistics can lead you to move some less used functionalities of your app into a sub-menu, or even remove them entirely.

XiTi statistics on iOS

Backelite provides you with a utility class to easily tag your app using XiTi. The code is open sourced under the Apache License 2.0, and can be found in this Google Code project.

How to use BkXitiTag

BkXitiTag is very simple to use, all you have to do is initialize it in the applicationDidFinishLaunching of your app delegate with:

// Init Xiti
[BkXitiTag xitiTagInitWithXitiSubDomain:"logi999" siteId:"1234" subsiteId:"1"];

And then tag pages and actions like this:

// Tag a page
[[BkXitiTag sharedXitiTag] tagPage:@"chapter1::page1"];

// Tag an action
[[BkXitiTag sharedXitiTag] tagAction:@"actions::button1_clicked"
                                              ofType:BkXitiTagActionTypeAction];

XiTi statistics on Android

For Android, we have the same kind of utility class. The code is again open sourced under the Apache License 2.0, and can be found in this Google Code project.

How to use XitiTagger

Initialize it in the onCreate method of your Application object with:

// Init Xiti
XitiTagger.getInstance().initialize(this, "logi999", "1234", "1");

And then tag pages and actions like this:

// Tag a page
XitiTagger.getInstance().tagPage("chapter1::page1");

// Tag an action
XitiTagger.getInstance().tagAction(XitiTagger.ActionType.ACTION,
                                                      "actions::button1_clicked");

XiTi statistics on Windows Phone 7

An Apache 2.0-licensed Google code project for Windows Phone 7 is available here.

Initialize the BkXitiTaggingService singleton during application start-up, e.g. in the App.xaml.cs file.

BkXitiTaggingService.Instance.Initialize("testsubdomain", "testsite",
                                         "testsubsite", false, true, false);

Then, in your code triggering analytics reporting events, for instance a button, add code similar to:

private void Button_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
        BkXitiTaggingService.Instance.TagPage("chapter1::page1");
}

Happy coding!

We hope that those little classes will help you providing great apps to your users, and improving existing ones.

As always, feel free to comment this article or give us feedback on the Google Code projects.