Mobile Application and User Analytics

Abstract

Mobile analytics is the systematic study of mobile device and application usage, and application performance, for the purpose of improving service quality. This chapter motivates the need for mobile analytics as an essential cog in the emerging economy built around devices, applications, and communication. A taxonomy of mobile analytics problems is presented, and technical details of a typical mobile analytics solution are discussed. Scale, heterogeneity, dynamically changing environments, and diverse privacy requirements pose challenges to collecting and processing data for such analysis. This chapter examines how analytics solutions handle these challenges. The core of the chapter consists of a technical section describing the general architecture of a mobile analytics solution, procedures to collect and process data, event monitoring infrastructure, system administration processes, and privacy management policies. Case studies of a number of analytics solutions available as commercial products or prototypes are presented.