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July 22, 2016
Mobile

Updates in Dev Center analytics

Through our developer forums and our Dev Center feedback channels, we receive a ton of great ideas about what you’d like the engineering teams to prioritize with regard to feature development. Many of these suggestions are related to analytics, and today we’re happy to announce a couple of updates that are a direct result of this feedback.

  1. Usage report updates

We’ve improved our Usage report to make usage data available to everyone with a published app in the Store. Previously, our usage report required the use of Visual Studio Application Insights. However, following some recent announcements, we have implemented new ways for you to understand how your app is being used by your customers. Please note that this report only includes usage data from customers on Windows 10.

The new Usage report provides info about user sessions and active users. You can also get a summary of the data by market and package version.

The Usage report also lets you get info on custom events which you instrument in your app by using the Microsoft Store Engagement and Monetization SDK.

Our approach for Usage reports is to have a core set of usage analytics available to everyone by default. For further usage reporting, consider integration with additional middleware solutions such as HockeyApp or one of our partner offerings.

  1. Life-to-date reporting

Recently we complemented our Acquisition reports with lifetime acquisition data, showing you the cumulative total acquisitions for your app. This has been a long-standing feature requested by many of you that we’re happy to be able to provide.

Our work isn’t complete here. We’re finalizing the lifetime reporting for in-app products, and we’re also planning to refresh the UWP Dev Center app to include this info. We’ll let you know when these updates are available.

We’d like to note that both of these updates are features that we first made available to participants in the Dev Center Insider Program. Developers who opted into the program got an early look at the updated reports and their feedback helped us make sure they were ready to release to all developers. If you haven’t opted in, take a look at some of the features currently included in the program and consider checking it out. You can opt out again at any time.

We’re continuing to work on some additional analytics features, and we’ll provide more updates in the coming months. If there’s a feature you’d like to see, leave a comment to let us know!

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Post written by Adrian Maziak, Principal Program Manager, Windows Dev Center