After having made its enterprise-level API management tools available for free only a few months ago, Palo Alto, CA-based Apigee today announced the public beta version its new Apigee Mobile Analytics software for developers. The software allows developers to identify and respond to problems with their mobile apps in real-time, and extends the company’s service offerings to now deliver end-to-end solutions from APIs to mobile analytics.
After conducting a Mobile App Review Survey, the results of which were also announced today, the company discovered that 20 percent of mobile app users would delete an app immediately if it froze for even five seconds. “What we’ve tried to do this is branch beyond the network part of APIs to actually getting in there at the apps and figuring out what can we do to have them working better,” VP of Developer Platform Ed Anuff said in an interview. “Mobile apps have a pretty big quality problem right now in terms of user experience, no matter how much effort you put into it. These apps are crashing, freezing, slow performance, and so we really looked at how can we address this.”
The new set of analytics tools require developers to add a line of code upon signing up to access a dashboard that lets them manage both performance and configuration issues that an end user may have. It allows them to track, diagnose, and fix issues on mobile devices in real-time through monitoring application logs, detecting crashes, and conducting A/B testing to determine which feature set would work best for their mobile app.
The company makes the suite of services and dashboard available to developers for free. Anuff mentioned that although there are a lot of other mobile analytics tools available, like Google Mobile Analytics, Flurry and Localytics, they tend to focus more on business and advertising-related analytics, things like click-through rates and how long a user spend on a certain screen. BetaKit also recently covered the launch of Poland-based Heatmaps, which shows developers a heat map of where end users are interacting on their applications and what gestures they may be using so they can optimize interface design. Apigee on the other hand is more geared towards performance and debugging issues, trying to help developers avoid negative App Store reviews.
“That’s really a natural extension of what people are already using our API management stuff for, particularly for enterprise customers, when we talk to one of these companies that has a mobile app, they don’t make a distinction between their API and mobile app,” Anuff added.
Apigee’s existing service helps companies turn their services into APIs, which are often leveraged by mobile developers. With an existing user base that includes both Fortune 500 companies to indie developers, it makes sense that Apigee would branch out to service both enterprise users and the developers leveraging their APIs.
