Last year we announced a program to provide the PreEmptive Solutions Runtime Analytics to Windows Phone developers free of charge. When it was first announced, the duration of the program was set to expire in April of this year. Due to the overwhelming response from the #wp7dev community, we are happy to announce that we are extending our agreement with PreEmptive Solutions to provide Runtime Intelligence for Windows Phone. To give comfort, we promise to give 60 days notice to all developers if this program will be coming to an end.
Analytics is an extremely important part of any mobile application release, and we want to encourage all of our developers to take advantage of the information they can glean about their customers from data extracted from Runtime Intelligence.
It sounds like most of the #wp7dev community already know the value of analytics. 3,000 of you have registered for the tool, and there are over 1,200 apps in the marketplace running with analytics. If you aren’t sure about whether or not the smart money is on analytics, consider this: of the top 100 apps in the Marketplace, 55% of them are running Runtime Intelligence, as are 70% of the top 50 apps.
Speaking of usage, one developer has so much data coming back from his multiple apps that they crossed 10 million messages sent back to the PreEmptive servers. Another developer has 129 applications instrumented.
What sorts of problems are developers solving with instrumentation? Here are a few for you to think about:
· Understanding the user settings and preferences across your application, coupled with any search strings, to provide better defaults
· Understanding the causes of crashes through the exception trapping
· Understanding the key features for your app to better target the split between Trail and Paid
· Understanding where best to place ad units in your app to increase click-thru and yields
I am sure that there are others, but these are a few to get you started. If you haven’t already grabbed a copy, head over to the PreEmtpive Solutions site to learn more.