In my previous post I complained about the 6 day delay in getting download number from Microsoft.  Since then I have done a little bit of research into other ways of getting that information in a more timely manner.  I found two good options MTIKS and Flurry.  They both provide much more information than I was looking for from Microsoft, and I will be using one or the other unless I find something better.

They are both very easy to use.  All you need to do is add a reference to their dll, then add one line of code to Application_Launching and Application_Activated to tell them to start a session, and another line to Application_Deactivated and Application_Closing to tell them to end the session.

They both also allow you to report exceptions and events.  This would allow me to see how many problems users are playing, or what percentage of users turn off time based scoring in Chess Tactics.

Of course each has their strength and weakness.

MTIKS

MTIKS biggest strength is that it can detect pirated apps so you can see how big of a problem pirated apps are for you.  My apps are all free at this point, so I’m not worried about pirates, and this feature isn’t a great selling point for me.

The other thing I really like about MTIKS was that it was real time (or very close to it).  I could start up a session in the emulator, click refresh on their site and see the session.

The one problem I did see with MTIKS is in their exception handling.  The stack trace gets overwritten if you log the error for Application_UnhandledException.  I contacted them about this and they responded quickly and are looking into the problem.  I’ll update this when they fix it.

Flurry

Flurry looks like it does a great job on the reporting side.  They allow you to compare your app to the aggregate data of other apps collecting the same info.  It lets you segment your reporting based on your users age, gender, language, location and even custom events (user who clicked the review this app button for example).  If you’re not collecting this information, Flurry will make some estimates for you.

The downside here is that Flurry runs on a about a 1 hour delay.  I of course would prefer instant gratification, but 1 hour isn’t too long to wait.  Right now I’m facing a 6 day delay in download numbers and a 3 day delay in exception reporting, so one hour seems totally resonable.