Every implement some new functionality in your app but wonder if your users are actually using that feature?  Ever add menu items and wonder if your users are aware they are there?  These are a couple of the questions I was asking myself on my android app.  I had spent 40 hours implmenting a new feature that I wasn't sure anyone would actually use.  I was also tempted to eliminate a few menu options because I wasn't sure they were being used.  To answer these questions I added Google Analytics to my android app.

I wasn't really aware that Google Analytics had hooks into Android until I saw it mentioned in a Google IO 2001 presentation about growing a mobile business.  I've used Google Analytics in the past on my blog to track articles read, unique visitors and see where traffic was originateing from.  I ended up watching the IO session 'Optimizing Android Apps with Google Analytics' on YouTube.  This session will show you everything you need to add analytics tracking into your Android application.

For simplicity I'll go over what I did to setup analytics and answer soem of the gotchas that I expereienced.  To get started, visit the Google Code page Analytics to get the SDK and jars you'll need to add to your project.  Your app will have to add two new permissions: android.permission.INTERNET and android.permission.ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE.  Both of these are necessary to push that data gathered to the Analytics servers.

To start gathering data you will need to create an instance of GoogleAnalyticsTracker in your Activity class.  They recommend starting the tracker in your onCreate() method by calling tracker.start("YOUR ANALYTICS ID", context).  This will start the data tracking for page views of this activity.  You will need to call the stop() method on the tracker in your onDestroy() method.  Now you have created the mechanism to capture the data but you still need to send it to Anaylicts manually.

To send data manually you will need to call  the dispatch() method on GoogleAnalyticsTracker.  The start() method does have an option paramater to dispatch your data at a set interval but sending data too often will only hurt the battery life of the phone.  You don't want your app killing the phone battery, leave that to the Google applications.  What I recommend is dispatching only on a specific button click or within the onDestry() method.  For testing you can specify an interval but once you know it's working you probably don't want it dispatching that often.  

How I implemented this was by creating my own parent Activity class that implement the onCreate() and onDestroy() methods.  I then extend this class in all of my activities.  This allows the Analytics code to be in one place and allows me to reference the GoogleAnalyticsTracker in the child classes.

Hopefully now if you are slightly interested in gathering information about how your application is used, you'll be able to easily add Google Analytics.  I found this amazingly easy to implement in my own applicaion.  It's great to see what screens are getting the most views and which parts of the app are seldomly used.  I can now see that no one has goen to my Help screen yet for instance.  I can also see that my app is being used in South Korea, Ireland and Argentina.  That is sorta  cool.