For anyone new to analytics let me explain why I am so excited and why you should be as well. Analytics gives you the ability to know who is using your application as well as how they are using it. Sounds easy enough right? The Flurry SDK integrates with your application and allows it to log “events” when they occur. A simple example would be logging an event where a button is clicked. That data is recorded and then sent up to the dashboard where patterns start to emerge on how many people are clicking that button, how they got to it, and what users do after it gets pressed.

Analytics helps by telling you two very important pieces of information:

Who is using your application?

The Flurry Analytics service will report the following information about the user/user’s device by default:

• Locale set on the device
• Time Zone
• Approximate location
• Device name (ex “BlackBerry Z10”)
• Device OS version
• Carrier

And can also be configured by you to report:

• The version of the app being used
• The user’s geolocation (with permission from the user)
• The user’s gender (if supplied by the user)
• The user’s age (if supplied by the user)
• The user ID (if used by your application)

This will let you know where your application is being used, as well as provide you an idea for the type of people that are using it. This in turn gives you the ability to tailor content to various regions and locales based on demand, as well as determine which device models you may want to focus on in the future.

How are people using your application?

Of course after you know who is using your application you will definitely want to know how they are using it. Flurry lets you log events that occur within your application, letting you map out every step the user takes. This is helpful so you can see trends for where they may be getting stuck, areas for improvement, and features that are being used more than expected and can be prioritized for enhancement in future releases. This information is invaluable for making informed decision on where to take the direction of your application.

From the aspect of monetization, knowing user patterns can help you understand what will make your application and possibly digital goods for sale, more attractive/valuable to the end user. Events would also allow you to track the success of promotions within your application. If you happen to sell a limited edition digital good, or offer to unlock the premium features of the app at a reduced price, you have the ability to track the success of the promotion with a relatively short turnaround.

The idea of tracking everything your users do may sound like a scary concept, however all data is made anonymous by the service meaning there is no way of tracking specific actions back to one device/user. Keeping the data anonymous keeps users from compromising their privacy while still maintaining the integrity of the data.

If you’re ready to add some analytics to your application then getting started is easy. Simply go over to the Flurry home page and create an account. Then create an application to get the analytics SDK for BlackBerry 10.

I’ve also whipped up a sample app that you can take a look at to get a feel for the APIs that can be downloaded from the Community Samples Repo on GitHub.

JAM68 – Flurry Mobile Analytics on BlackBerry 10!!

If you’re lucky enough to be at BlackBerry Jam Americas this week, you can attend JAM68 where Anthony Watkins and Rich Brett from Flurry will be presenting with me on how to integrate the Analytics SDK into your BlackBerry applications. For those unable to make it, the recording should be posted a few days following the session and you can always send me a message on Twitter with your questions/comments: @garettBeuk

For more information you can also refer to our Analytics page on the forums:

http://developer.blackberry.com/devzone/develop/platform_services/platform_analytics.html
http://supportforums.blackberry.com/t5/BlackBerry-Analytics-Service/bd-p/analytics_serv

Image from http://failblog.cheezburger.com/

On our developer website, we provide a seamless solution consisting of replacing the Google Maps library for Android with a web view integrating the web version of Google Maps. More information can be found by following this link.

That said, a fellow Italian developer (the maker of Prezzi Benzina), just sent me detailed information on how they easily replaced Google Maps with Open Street Maps, a free worldwide map providing open data under the ODBL (Open Data Commons Open Database License).

The result? Outstanding! And since it is a very common issue faced by many Android developers making use of Google Maps in their Android applications, we wanted to share in this blog how they did it.

Download

First of all, you must download the Open Street Maps library from the following link: https://code.google.com/p/osmdroid/

You can either download the jar ready to use osmdroid-android-3.0.8.jar or download the source code and compile it (recommended).

Step 1: Layout Change

Pretty easy. You code goes from

<com.google.android.maps.MapView
        android:id="@+id/mapview"
        android:layout_width="fill_parent"
        android:layout_height="fill_parent"
        android:apiKey="@+string/mapviewkey"
        android:clickable="true" />

to

<org.osmdroid.views.MapView
        android:id="@+id/mapview"
        android:layout_width="fill_parent"
        android:layout_height="fill_parent" />

Unlike Google Maps, no key is needed for OSM.

Step 2: Modify Import

Most class names remain the same, so it’s very straight forward..

Your code goes from:

import com.google.android.maps.GeoPoint;
import com.google.android.maps.MapController;
import com.google.android.maps.MapView;

to

import org.osmdroid.util.GeoPoint;
import org.osmdroid.views.MapController;
import org.osmdroid.views.MapView;

In addition, you might want to add the following:

import org.osmdroid.views.overlay.ItemizedIconOverlay;
import org.osmdroid.views.overlay.ItemizedIconOverlay.OnItemGestureListener;
import org.osmdroid.views.overlay.OverlayItem;
import org.osmdroid.views.overlay.OverlayManager;
import org.osmdroid.views.overlay.mylocation.GpsMyLocationProvider;
import org.osmdroid.views.overlay.mylocation.MyLocationNewOverlay;

WARNING: resources

The default class for resources is: DefaultResourceProxyImpl. It handles English only, so you probably have to create your own with the proper translations.

    ResourceProxyImpl resProxyImp = new ResourceProxyImpl(this);

Step 3: Map Customization

From

mapView = (MapView) findViewById(R.id.mapview);
mapView.setBuiltInZoomControls(true);
mMyLocationOverlay = new MyLocationOverlay(this, mapView);
mapView.getOverlays().add(mMyLocationOverlay);

to

mapView = (MapView) findViewById(R.id.mapview);
mapView.setUseSafeCanvas(false);
//enable zoom controls
mapView.setBuiltInZoomControls(true);

//enable multitouch
mapView.setMultiTouchControls(true);
//GpsMyLocationProvider can be replaced by your own class. It provides the position information through GPS or Cell towers.
GpsMyLocationProvider imlp = new GpsMyLocationProvider(this.getBaseContext());
//minimum distance for update
imlp.setLocationUpdateMinDistance(1000);
//minimum time for update
imlp.setLocationUpdateMinTime(60000);       
mMyLocationOverlay = new MyLocationNewOverlay(this.getBaseContext(),imlp , mapView, resProxyImp);
mMyLocationOverlay.setUseSafeCanvas(false);
mMyLocationOverlay.setDrawAccuracyEnabled(true);

mapView.getOverlays().add(mMyLocationOverlay);

Step 4: Add Marker

In OSMDroid there are some classes ready to use. The best is ItemizedIconOverlay.

Create an overlay and add it to the map:

ItemizedIconOverlay markersOverlay = new ItemizedIconOverlay(new LinkedList(), myMarker, null, resProxyImp);
mapView.getOverlays().add(markersOverlay);
Add markers
OverlayItem ovm = new OverlayItem("titolo", "descrizione", new GeoPoint(s.LatitudeE6(), s.LongitudeE6()));
ovm.setMarker(myMarker);
markersOverlay.addItem(ovm);

Of course, this is just the basic part of the story. There is much more available on OSMDroid – feel free to explore and bring your Android app to BlackBerry 10 easily!

What’s Count.ly? It is a real-time mobile analytics platform that shows information by using eye-catching visual elements. Görkem provided me with a test account and after logging in, I was very impressed by what I saw. The UI is gorgeus and the amount of useful and critical information a dev can get about their app is impressive.

Moreover, it’s an open-source project in which the team aims to discuss the future of Count.ly in an open, democratic environment. They offer the developers the opportunity to take part in the community, to send bug reports, feature requests, to provide fixes and best practices. It collects data from mobile phones, and visualizes this information to analyze mobile application usage and end-user behavior.

Having the ability to see how your users behave is critical for the success of an app. Developers can get a clear picture on what’s working well and what’s not working, what their users like the most, what the least/most used feature is and, last but not least, how much time people spend in your app and doing what.

When we met, BlackBerry 10 was not supported yet, but they were very interested in investing in our new upcoming platform (after the conference, even more!) and for that reason, twenty days after, they finally published their first SDKs for BlackBerry 10.

What’s so special with Count.ly?

• It has a dashboard
  • where you stay up to date
  • where you can easily monitor your data with graphics
  • which shows you everything at once with no need to dig in several pages
  • where you can track unlimited number of applications and switch between your apps, games and ebooks

• It has a special user behaviour stats experience in which;
  • you can track and visualize your users’ behaviours
  • you can see your application’s in-app performance
  • you can understand your customer’s behaviour and where user left off
  • you can observe your players closely to ensure success and maximize your online game revenue

• You can build better apps, games and ebooks;
  • by measuring and evaluating mobile app engagement as it enables optimization of mobile content
  • by exploring where a spike occurs and by personalizing and optimizing your app according to stats
  • by the help of the support that Countly offers for leading smartphones (iOS, Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry)

• You can produce electronic reports with customizable charts and tables, showing how your application performed for a given period, add / remove pages through report generator.

Also, Count.ly is free. You can install Count.ly in-app analytics tool on your server to track unlimited number of mobile applications, if you want.

Here is what Onu Alp, Soner, co-founder of Count.ly, told me:

“The best feature of Count.ly is custom events: we help developers identify in-app purchase patterns, defining the best flow for payment. This is a crucial factor towards maximizing revenues in e-books and games. We are thrilled with what BlackBerry provides in their next-gen mobile OS, and decided to invest in BlackBerry 10 SDK. Being the most complete open source, real-time mobile analytics app in the world, we believe Count.ly will provide a lot of value for BlackBerry 10 developers”

If you are a BlackBerry 10 developer looking for a good option for in-app analytics, Count.ly is definitely a great choice. The team is also very accessible and happy to help if needed.

You can download the Countly WebWorks SDK from GitHub here, while the Cascades SDK can be download from here.

When you built the first version of your BlackBerry® platform application, you probably had a very clear idea of what you wanted to accomplish: the features and user experience that would mean success. Then you put your hard work out there on BlackBerry App World™ and you got downloads. Maybe you got a bunch of feedback and reviews and now you are gearing up for version 2. How do you know where to invest your time?

You can’t do every feature that you can think of, or that your users request – not if you want to actually release a version 2 in a reasonable time. Even if you tried to cram a bunch in there, imagine what that would do to your flow and user experience. While your own ideas and user feedback have an obvious place in your planning, what do you really know about how your app is used?

• How many users are on 5.0, 6.0 or 7.0?
• Do you have a predominant device or form factor?
• Have you tested on all the top user devices?
• Is there a device that you expected more users from and have you tested on that device?
• Where are your users from?
• How often and for how long is your app used?
• Does that feature you spent so much time on really being used?

Those are just some starter questions that could be answered with the simple inclusion of the BlackBerry® Analytics SDK. The SDK was released in beta last year and went Gold just before BlackBerry DevCon Americas. It was for Java® applications only at first, but I am pleased to announce there is a BlackBerry® WebWorks™ Extension for it now, which is available in our BlackBerry WebWorks Community APIs repository on github.

The extension is really a simplified JavaScript wrapper for the Java-based SDK, which does all the hard work. There is no perceptible performance impact, minimal additional data usage, queueing events out of coverage, and data is collected in aggregate with no user identifying information reported. Even if you just sign up for the service and copy the sample code into your application, I think you will be very pleased with the value of the data reported. This extension is BlackBerry smartphone-only right now, but an SDK for BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablets is in development.

Note that data is analyzed within 24 hours of being received so you will have to wait a bit when you first get started. Issues with the extension should be submitted at github.com, but if you have questions you can always post in our Analytics Service Forum.

So what are you waiting for? Visit github and get the extension today. Sign up for your Analytics account (it only takes a minute) and add the code to your app. Try it out in your next beta!

We have a free analytics tool available to developers for BlackBerry App World™ and across all major app stores. We enable them to track applications across all those stores, but also in terms of advertising networks. So we allow them to track their own applications, to look at their rankings and see how they’re doing in each country and each store, and also look at what they’re making from each purchase and from advertising revenue.

You break it down into categories too, to see how they’re doing in each category?

Yes – so for example, they can look at the Business category or the top level of the Games category, so they can compare themselves against competitors. It makes it very relevant for them to see how they’re doing in each market.

Your service also supports Apple App Store, Google Android Market and other storefronts. For developers who build for multiple platforms, are they able to compare their data from across different storefronts if they’re selling or offering their app in those?

Yes. That’s also the added value – so they can have one chart, for example, stacking up revenue from Apple, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and Nokia. So, all the major stores we do support, and they can even integrate the ad revenue, so they can instantly see what kind of business models are working best for them.

Whether it’s a freemium or a one-time purchase or if ad-supported really is the best model – they can track it over all the different storefronts and see.

Yeah, and we see a lot of revenue coming from after users downloaded the applications. It used to be that the paid application was very popular, but right now a lot of revenue is being made from in-app purchase or advertising, so they can really see how the model is evolving for them. They can even benchmark it against the market, so they can see what proportion of revenue is generated by in-app services, what kind of ad revenue they’re making, and compare that against the market.

So when you’re looking at all the data – and you obviously have a ton of data here at your disposal – do you internally then look at that and do…is it monthly and quarterly reports?

Yes, and developers may also know our name because we publish a lot of reports about the aggregated data we collect. So we collect a lot of data from a lot of developers, and we aggregate that data and we provide reports for free on our website that give general insight into how the market is evolving. We also have paid reports that are available to other companies – mainly device manufacturers, operators and larger developers – the ones who are interested in a variety of metrics. For example, they’d like to know which apps are successful, or how large is Apple versus Google in a certain market.

The service today – it’s free to sign up for and connect to any of the stores?

Yeah, it’s very simple – just go to the website, sign up and allow us access to your reporting. We don’t need to insert any code into your application, you’ll be set up in a few minutes and you can get charting away.

What other services are you looking at now with all that data? Are there more things you’re looking at offering? I know you mentioned ads – that’s available today?

That’s available today. You can add four different ad networks right now, and we’re looking to add a few more.

What are the ad networks now?

iAd, Adfonic, AdMob, and InMobi.

When you’re looking at storefronts now, what trends do you see? We talk about advertising and in-app purchasing and freemium models, but what trends interest you? What do you like looking at when you’re looking at reports?

What’s very interesting in the east – for example, China – is that it’s gaining a lot of momentum in a lot of stores in terms of the development that’s being made. That’s a market that’s really exploding right now. What you mentioned about in-app purchases – that’s very relevant, and also looking at types of content that are popular in different storefronts. Games are typically very popular, but it differs by device and by storefront. Those trends are very interesting to look at.

Alright, so, this may be a loaded question – on BlackBerry smartphones or BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablets, what’s your favorite app?

For the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, I think the games are very nice, beautiful games – the racing games, I really like, and of course I always like the Cut The Rope. But the racing games on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet are very nice to play with.

Alright, so thank you very much, and we really appreciate you coming out to BlackBerry DevCon Europe.

Thank you so much.

Free, paid, ad-supported, try-and-buy, or freemium…whatever your BlackBerry® smartphone app, we’ve got your service. BlackBerry DEVCON 2010 featured three platform services that are sure to make their way into thousands of apps this coming year: Advertising Service, Payment Service, and Analytics Service.

Let’s start with the Advertising Service, which allows you access to a wealth of ad networks and advertisers very simply and easily. How simply and easily? Well, with just three lines of code, you’re plugged into a mediation platform that grants you access to a number of top ad networks, no negotiations required.

Banner bannerAd = new Banner(MY_APID, targettingData);
bannerAd.setMMASize(Banner.MMA_SIZE_AUTO);
add(bannerAd);

Simple as it might look, the Advertising Service has more power than you might think. You have the option of displaying a traditional ad banner or with no additional coding, you can support ads that to do a whole lot more:

• click to launch BlackBerry App World™ to a given vendor or app download page
• click to add a calendar or address book entry
• click to view full screen rich media

So how do you track your success with the BlackBerry Advertising Service? Analysis and control are accessible via a single web console that houses all your data for analytics, tracking, reporting, fill rates, ad performance, and earnings. The central console allows you to easily add or remove ad networks and manage ad allocations without making any changes to your app.

If an ad-supported model doesn’t fit your needs, maybe micro-transactions/in-app payment is more up your alley. The BlackBerry Payment Service will allow you to easily offer digital goods for sale in your app while still providing the consumer with the same trusted and consistent purchase experience they have today in BlackBerry App World. As you would expect, with BlackBerry Payment Service, you will have access to the same payment options that BlackBerry App World supports today for traditional app purchases: PayPal, credit card, and carrier billing.

So when might you want to use the BlackBerry Payment Service? Some typical use cases are:

• Digital Content, such as eBooks, magazines, photos, artwork, or digital property that you can use on a BlackBerry smartphone.
• Additional App Functionality, which might include things like new features, levels, characters, or games. This use lends itself extremely well to the freemium app model and should be used as the new gold standard for try-and-buy.
• Services, such as premium video content, subscription renewal, pay-as-you-go application use, or voice transcription. Basically, any kind of digital service that a BlackBerry smartphone user pays to use.

Whether you’re using the BlackBerry Advertising Service, BlackBerry Payment Service, neither or both, the one service that most apps will be clamoring to access is the new BlackBerry Analytics Service, a service to monitor the adoption and effectiveness of your BlackBerry application. Here’s a high-level overview of the BlackBerry Analytics Service’s features:

• Key app metrics such as when and how often a user opens your app.
• Information about how much time a user spends in your app.
• User base stats such as which model of BlackBerry smartphone is being used, which version of software the user has installed, which carrier network the user is on, and which version of your application the user has installed.
• Flexibility to define your own metrics such as how many users make it to a certain level or actually complete a game, which features of the app are accessed more commonly than others, how and when users access remote data on a server versus leveraging cached content.

The BlackBerry Advertising Service is now live.

The BlackBerry Payment Service SDK is in beta now and the full SDK and app implementation is expected to launch this fall.

The BlackBerry Analytics Service goes into beta this fall and launches in the first half of 2011.

Let us know what you think of these or any other BlackBerry Platform service! http://na.blackberry.com/eng/developers/platform/