Analyze How Your App is Used

Just like you probably analyze how people use your website, you can also view how your app is being used. In this guide we'll take a look at how you can do that with your existing website analytics tool (e.g. Google Analytics). Afterwards, we'll check out some additional statistics about how many people are using your app.

Filtering App Users in Your Website Analytics

Filtering by User Agent

The easiest way to separate website users from app users in your analytics is by filtering the user agents. The user agent is a short string that the browser sends to websites. The user agent contains information about the browser, for example a Firefox browser could send something like this user agent:

User Agents Used by the App

The app uses a few different user agents:

• $regularUserAgent App-WebView ($operatingSystem) $version
  This is the usual user agent used by the internal browser of the app. Requests made with this user agent are initiated by the app user. This is the user agent you should look for in your analytics.
• App-HttpClient $version
  This is the user agent used for requests made by the app that are not directly initiated by the user. For example the app makes some requests with this to store parts of the website for offline use.

$version is the internal version of the app (e.g. 1.4.8+52) and $operatingSystem is the platform the app is being used on (e.g. ios or android).

$regularUserAgent is the user agent of a mobile browser that would be expected from the device, like Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 12_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/15E148

You don't really need to worry about all of this, unless you want to do something special. Otherwise, just follow the next steps to filter by the user agent in your analytics.

Filtering By User Agent in Google Analytics

As an example, this is how to filter by user agent in Google Analytics:

Click "Explore" in the menu on the left side.

Create a new exploration.

Enter a name for your new exploration, for example "App Users".

Create a new segment.

Select "User segment".

Name the segment.

Add a new "Browser" condition.

Set the filter to "contains" "App-WebView". If you want to filter for just iOS users, you can use "App-WebView (ios)". For Android, you'd use "App-WebView (android)".

Filtering App Users with JavaScript

A more complicated but also more powerful way of detecting whether a user is visiting your website with a browser or the app is with the help of JavaScript. This is especially useful if your analytics software does not support filtering by user agents.

The easiest option is using getAppPlatform from the app helper script. The function returns null if the app is opened in the browser, otherwise the operating system the app is used on. However, as mentioned in its documentation, this only works if you let the app modify user agents.

An option that doesn't rely on user agents is executeWhenAppReady. The code inside it will only be executed if your website is being viewed inside the app.

Viewing App Download Statistics

If you want to find out how many people have downloaded your app, you can check out the statistics the app stores collect.

Google Play Console

You can view statistics about your Android app in the Google Play Console.

The first statistic you will see is how many people have installed your app ("Installed audience").

But there's a lot of other statistics you could view, for example monthly active users.

Apple App Store

Similarly, you can view statistics about your iOS app on the App Store Connect analytics page.

You can view the most analytics on the metrics page.

Be careful when comparing statistics between the Play Console and App Store Connect, since some metrics could have the same name but still be measured differently. For example App Store Connect might show you the new downloads on a given day, while the Play Console aggregates all downloads, so you see the total number of downloads.