How do you acquire usage data from a webOS app and store that data remotely?

Question

I am new to webOS development. I have one app in the app store and in the next update to the app I would like to be able to identify the age of users, their location, how long they use the app, which features they use the most/least and then store that data in a database. How do I do this? Many thanks in advance for your help.

Answer 1

Well, that's a pretty big question. Here's an outline of what to do, with some notes.

First, you're probably not going to be able to get age unless you ask the user directly and they tell you. Also, you're only going to get location if the application is location-aware and the user permits you to collect that data (when you install a location-aware application, it asks the user if they're okay with the fact that the application will be able to get their location).

As for how long they use the app and which features they use, that's easier. Depending on the granularity you need/want to capture, you can just record time stamps when a user starts and stops using a particular feature, such as when scene activate and deactivate methods fire. As long as you store feature name and timestamp, that should give you what you're looking for.

Then comes to question of collection. However you store it in the app, you have a couple of choices for how to get it out of the app. Unless you can get your users to just email the data to you, probably the easiest thing to do would be to create a web app (possibly with no user facing output, since you're just using it to collect data) using something like Google App Engine that gives you a URL you can send a POST request to using an HTTP request. Depending on how you set it up, it could do the request every time you collect a timestamp (bad for battery use, though), just occasionally, or only when the app is doing cleanup (possibly a problem if you don't get the request off in time).

I'd recommend taking a look online at how people do this type of thing in iPhone apps to get a good sense of how to do this type of thing. If you hit problems getting particular things to work, you can of course come here to StackOverflow with specific coding questions.