News

Snappy Touch's Noel Llopis on why he chose Localytics' analytics

Flurry is bloat

Snappy Touch's Noel Llopis on why he chose Localytics' analytics
Over on his Games From Within blog, Noel Llopis of Snappy Touch (Flower Garden, Casey's Contraptions), is pondering analytics.

"...I'm a low-level, do-it-myself kind of guy, with a deep mistrust and suspicion of middleware. So you would think that I would want to write my own analytics package," he says.

Of course not.

As he argues, analytics is a difficult job, both in terms of how collecting data can impact app performance, and, more significantly, in terms of getting useful information out of the mass of data you collect.

Small and sweet

So, looking at commercially available solutions, he passes over Google and Flurry.

"The killer deal for me was bloat. Adding the Flurry analytics library to an app increased the executable size by 500KB. I'm sorry, but that's completely unacceptable," he explains, in the case of the latter.

Instead, Llopis decides on Localytics, which despite some other limitations, is open source and easy to integrate.

Still, he's more interested in starting a debate than getting wrapped up in individual solutions, hence limiting his advice to tips such as "Less is more. Start with just a few events and go from there. If you have tons of data, you might never have the time to look at it."

You can read the post on Games From Within.
Contributing Editor

A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.