BlackBerry devs – please welcome Brent for a special guest post about BlackBerry® Analytics Service 1.0, just released today! Let him know if you have any questions in the comments. – Ed.

Today we’re announcing the release of BlackBerry Analytics Service 1.0, powered by webtrends™. This service is available to any developer of Java®-based apps for BlackBerry® smartphones at no charge for up to 25,000,000 server calls per month. BlackBerry Analytics enables you to collect and analyze data on how your apps are being used. Reports that are generated can provide insight that can be used to understand how users are engaging your app, enhance user experience in order to drive more downloads, learn how to market your app more effectively, and be better able to detect issues as they arise rather than waiting for feedback.

Insightful Reports

BlackBerry Analytics Service 1.0 provides more than 20 interactive reports that can supply useful insights about how your app is being used. I don’t have the space to review all of the reports, but I’ll provide a couple of examples to provide a taste of the available reports and how they can be used.

The screenshot at the top of the blog post shows the Key Metrics report. In this case, we can see that the sample apps average number of users has been progressively growing for the past few weeks. So if the app developer monitors this report, they could track the positive response to the launch of a new version of their app and evaluate the success of marketing activities on specific days. They could also see if their app is used by more people during weekdays than weekends, perhaps suggesting that the app is helpful for some work-related activities.

The Events report shown below could give that same developer some clues on which app features are more popular with their users. This report shows the relative frequency of various events – basically meaning the usage of a particular feature. In this sample app, we see that searching by Category is much more popular than searching by SearchBar. Based on this insight, the developer could work to further improve their Category search functionality and release a new version of their app that would be even more appealing to their users.

Easy to Integrate

You may be wondering how much effort it takes to get these reports. Well, we’ve made every effort to keep things easy to use. It’s a simple matter of registering for the service and downloading the SDK*. The Analytics Service also requires BlackBerry® Device Software v4.5 or higher. Then, after adding the library to your app and writing a few lines of code to initialize the BlackBerry Analytics Service, each specific user action of interest can be captured by writing just one line of code.

Getting Started

After reading this post, hopefully you’re eager to get started with the BlackBerry Analytics Service — register for the service here! More information and step-by-step instructions are available on the BlackBerry Analytics Service documentation page.