Adding privacy-first analytics to Personal Best

05 Jun 2021

Intro

My workout-tracking app Personal Best has always put privacy first. It’s the right thing to do from both an ethical and business perspective, giving people an alternative to some of the larger workout-tracking apps that have questionable privacy practices.

However, as the app has grown and matured I found myself wanting to know more about how the app was being used, to help me know where to focus my efforts. I didn’t want anything too fancy – no creepy stuff like tracking user journeys or measuring engagement time, I simply wanted to anonymously log some events when certain parts of the app were used.

Finding the right analytics service

There are many third-party SDKs that can add analytics to iOS apps, like Google Analytics and Mixpanel. The problem with these, for me, was that they’re at best massive dependencies I’d need to integrate into my app (which prior to now contained no third-party dependencies), and at worst creepy closed-source SDKs doing who-knows-what behind the scenes.

It’s worth noting that iOS itself includes basic analytics, but it really is basic. You can’t currently (early June 2021) use it to log arbitrary events, just overall usage. It’s also far from real time.

Eventually I learned about AppTelemetry from an issue of iOS Dev Weekly. Their tagline – “Lightweight Analytics That’s Not Evil” – sounded exactly like what I was looking for. I checked it out and it had everything going for it:

From an indie developer who believed in privacy
Built-in anonymisation of users
Open source, so I could see exactly how it worked
A really lightweight codebase, just one class of about 300 lines of code, so it wouldn’t add much overhead to my build times

With all that, I decided to give AppTelemetry a go and signed up for the beta.

Integrating it

Initially I just followed AppTelemetry’s great documentation exactly, adding calls to TelemetryManager to my screens. However, this meant I then had to add import TelemetryClient to every file I wanted to log an event in. To fix this, I made a new file within my project that could abstract away all of the Telemetry stuff. Plus, it’s better to use a layer of abstraction like this so that I can more easily switch out the analytics provider in the future, if that’s something I want to do.

// AnalyticsManager.swift

import TelemetryClient

struct AnalyticsManager {

  // Call this when the app starts.
  static func initialize() {
    let configuration = TelemetryManagerConfiguration(appID: "YOUR_ID_HERE")
    TelemetryManager.initialize(with: configuration)
    print("➡️ Initialized TelemetryManager.")
  }

  // Log an event.
  static func log(_ name: String) {
    print("➡️ Logging analytic event '\(name)'.")
    TelemetryManager.send(name)
  }

  // Log an event with arbitary metadata attached.
  static func log(_ name: String, with metadata: [String: String]) {
    print("➡️ Logging analytic event '\(name)' with metadata \(metadata).")
    TelemetryManager.send(name, with: metadata)
  }

  // Log when a screen is opened.
  static func logScreenOpened(_ screenName: String) {
    let name = "ScreenOpened"
    let metadata = ["ScreenName": screenName]
    print("➡️ Logging analytic event '\(name)' with metadata \(metadata).")
    TelemetryManager.send(name, with: metadata)
  }
}

Following this, I can simply call AnalyticsManager anywhere in my code that I want:

// Logging a basic event
Button(action: {
  AnalyticsManager.log("WorkoutShared")
  openShareSheet()
}) {
  Text("Share workout")
}

// Logging an event with metadata
Button(action: {
  AnalyticsManager.log("AppIconChanged", with: ["IconName": selectedAppIcon])
  setAppIcon(selectedAppIcon)
}) {
  Text("Change app icon")
}

// Logging when a screen is opened
var body: some View {
  Text("Hello World")
    .onAppear {
      AnalyticsManager.logScreenOpened("HelloWorldScreen")
    }
}

There’s not much else to it, really. As it’s such a simple library this is all the code I needed to start seeing events in real time.

Preserving privacy

One thing to be aware of is that even though you’re using a privacy-first analytics library you still need discipline to ensure you preserve privacy. There’s nothing stopping you from logging personally-identifiable information to AppTelemetry except your own judgement.

To prevent this, always collect the bare minimum of data that you need. For example, in the above code sample for logging a WorkoutShared event, I deliberately don’t collect any information about the workout. Even though the workout doesn’t contain any personally-identifiable information, there’s just no need for me to know the details of it, so I don’t include it.

Also, the more data you collect, the more data types you’ll have to mention in your App Store privacy nutrition label, so it’s in your best interests to limit what you collect.

Thanks for reading.

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If you liked this post, you'll love my iOS apps. Check them out below.

Adding privacy-first analytics to Personal Best

Intro

Finding the right analytics service

Integrating it

Preserving privacy

Thanks for reading.

Personal Best

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