Getting Started

Welcome to Zoho Apptics! The right place for your apps.

Zoho Apptics is the privacy-by-design application analytics solution that provides you with in-app usage, engagement, and performance monitoring in a single console. Integrating your apps with Zoho Apptics empowers you with transparent insights from within your apps.

Zoho Apptics helps app owners, developers, and marketers to make data-driven decisions at every touchpoint within the app. It allows:

App developers to keep a check on the health and performance of the app.
App marketers to understand adoption and engagement within the app along with drop-off at every step.
App owners with a complete picture in a single dashboard.

Features

All the features within Apptics are purpose-bundled together to make sense of the data in the console. Apptics' features are grouped as:

App quality: Crash reporting, in-app feedback and bug reporting, store reviews, performance metrics (iOS), and remote logger.
App growth: In-app updates, in-app ratings, and remote configuration.
App engagement: Flows, funnels, sessions, screens, events, and APIs.
App audience (adoption): New devices, active devices, retention, geography, and app version.

Apart from the mentioned features, Apptics offers an out-of-the-box user consent module that gives your app users complete control over their data-sharing preferences. The user consent module helps you comply with various privacy regulations around data sharing across the globe.

Architecture

Apptics' architecture is based on a combination of how data flows from the user's device to Apptics console.

Supported SDKs

Zoho Apptics supports all your favorite SDKs.

Android
iOS
iPadOS
macOS
tvOS
watchOS
React Native
Flutter
Unity
Windows

You can integrate your apps with Apptics in three simple steps.

Log in or Sign up for a Zoho Apptics account.
Create a portal and a project in Zoho Apptics.
Complete the SDK integration and start receiving data in the Apptics console.

Setup your Apptics account

Visit www.zoho.com/apptics/ on your web browser.
Fill in the necessary details to sign up, accept the Terms of Service and Privacy policy, and click on Get Started.

If you already have an account, click Sign in.

Once you sign in, you will be redirected to the Create Portal page. Add the details such as the portal name and the company name. The portal URL will get automatically generated with the portal name.
When you create a portal in Zoho Apptics and if you agree for Zoho Apptics to collect app data from your users, you are given a choice as to whether you will be willing to ask your app users for consent for data collection or not.
If you decide to use the user consent module, the user is asked to review their privacy preferences in the app's settings upon their first interaction with the app. A sample screenshot from an Apple smartphone.
- If the user selects, `include my identity` and all the other options are enabled, data is collected from the user's device will be associated with the user identity.
- If the user disables, `include my identity`and all the other options are enabled, data is collected from the user's device but will remain anonymous in Apptics. A randomly generated identifier will be associated to the data.
- If the user disables all the options, no data tracking will happen.
Click Create and a portal will be created.

Create a project

Provide the project name and click Next.
Select the platform for your project and click Next.
Complete the integration and you are good to go. You can complete the integration right-away or skip for now and later complete it from the Quickstart page.

NOTE: The user who creates the portal is the Super admin of the portal and will have all the privileges. There can be only one Super admin for each portal. There can be an `N` number of admins for a portal. An admin will also have all the privileges in the portal however the admin cannot update or delete an existing portal.

Invite users to the portal

You can invite members to the Portal and add them to your project. Zoho Apptics offers role-based access, where the portal admin or the project manager decides what pages can be accessed by whom within a project. Defining specific roles is important as it is easy to manage an individual working on multiple projects with different permission levels.

You can add or invite a new member to any one of the following roles - Platform Development Lead, Platform Developer, Marketer, Platform Design Lead, Platform Designer, Testing Lead, Tester, Follower, and Client.

NOTE: You can invite multiple users by separating the email addresses by a comma.

Click on the profile picture in the upper right corner.
Navigate to Portal Members and click Invite User.
Add the email addresses of the user(s) you want to invite to the portal.
Select the type of user, i.e. user or admin.
Select the project to which the user will have access and the role of the user. (This is optional)
Click Invite and an invitation mail will be sent to the users. The users will have to accept the mail invite, to be able to access Apptics.

Add portal members to the project

Go to Settings > Project members.
Click on the + icon under the specific roles.
A pop-up will appear with all the portal members. Select the portal member and click Done. The user will be added to your project.

NOTE: Only the portal members will be listed in the pop-up. If the user you are trying to add is not available in the list, contact your portal admin to add them to the portal. You can find the portal admin on the portal members page.

Devices, users, and data

The data collected based on the user consent is shown as opt-in, anonymous opt-in, and opt-out. For the opt-out devices, the total number of opt-out devices and the consent state will be maintained in the Apptics server.

When you add the Apptics SDK to your app and call the relevant methods, Apptics SDK will be initialized for your app. Refer to our SDK guide.

Now when a user downloads the app from the marketplace, the device is registered as a `New Device` in Apptics with a device ID and a randomly generated UUID.

Once the SDK is initialized within the app, by default tracking will start anonymously and the data will not be associated with any identifier until you use the setuser() method. You can use any identifier in the setuser() method. Refer to our SDK guide for detailed information on how to use setuser() method.

The user ID that you use in the setuser() method should also be maintained at your end as well. You can later use this user ID to search data in the Apptics console.

WARNING! You should not use any direct personally identifiable information in the setuser() method. If you do have to use a direct PII, make sure that the same is conveyed to your app users.

Generally, the new devices in Apptics can be equated to the number of downloads from the marketplace. However, this data should not be compared with the App Store or Play Store installed count. The reason being, we ignore the global opt-in status and collect the consent preference from each device.

The key metric to measure is the active devices (cumulative and unique). The active devices are a measure of at least one active session during the defined period. You can see the unique active devices for 30 calendar days and above 30 days you can see the cumulative count.

NOTE: When you use Zoho Apptics as your preferred analytics solution, you don't have to implement Apple's tracking transparency (ATT) framework.

Data in Apptics dashboard

The dashboard in the Apptics console gives you an overview about your app's key metrics such as crashes, sessions, new devices, active devices, opt-in/anonymous pot-in, opt-devices, along with the top events and screens.

Definitions

New devices: The total number of devices in which the app has been downloaded and installed. Whenever the device is reset to factory settings or the app is removed and installed again, the device is registered as a new device in Apptics.
Active devices (cumulative): The total number of devices in which atleast one active session has happened.
Active devices (unique): The unique number of devices in which atleast one active session has happened in the past 30 days. For example:
- Day 1 - Device A, B, C, D (4 unique devices)
- Day 2 - Device A, C, E, F, G (5 devices, 3 unique)
- Day 3 - Device A, C, H, I (4 devices, 2 unique)
- Total unique active devices for 3 days - 4+3+2 unique devices
Opt-in devices: The total number of devices where the user has given consent for data tracking with their identity.
Anonymous opt-in devices: The total number of devices where the user has given consent for data tracking but without their identity.
Opt-out devices: The total number of devices where the user denies any data collection and tracking.

Devices and data sharing preferences

This section explains the different scenarios when there is a change in the device data-sharing state and how it affects the collected data in Apptics.

Use case A - A user has opt-in today and later changes to:

Anonymous opt-in - This will be considered a new user. There will be no connection between user A and this new anonymous user.
Opt-out - The data collection will stop immediately once the state is set to opt-out.

Use case B - A user is anonymous opt-in and later changes to:

Opt-in with identity - This will be considered a new user. There will be no connection between user A and this new user.
Opt-out - The data collection will stop immediately once the state is set to opt-out.

Use case C - A user has opt-out and later changes to:

Opt-in with identity - Data will be collected with the user's identity once the state is changed to opt-in with identity.
Anonymous opt-in - Data will be collected but not associated with the user's identity.

NOTE: User consent module is not mandatory to be used and the above use cases will be applicable only if you choose to use the User consent module from Apptics. If you choose not to use the consent module and yet the in-app data contains any direct personally identifiable information, make sure you convey this to your app's users.