Amazon announced Analytics and A/B Testing services, further expanding its cross-platform services for iOS and Android developers.
Offered as a single, free SDK, mobile developers can easily track user engagement metrics or test different in-app experiences across iOS, Android, and Fire OS, giving developers the tools they need to increase user engagement and monetization. The Analytics and A/B Testing services are designed to help developers focus more time on building great apps and games, rather than setting up or cutting down on backend infrastructure. Additionally, because the services are built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), they scale seamlessly from a few users to many millions.
Developers value data-driven decision making and experimentation as it helps them increase engagement and sales. However, today's off-the-shelf options for analytics and testing can be slow, inaccurate, expensive, or platform dependent. Developers who build their own analytics and testing solutions are forced to spend more time on building and scaling backend services, and less time on creating new content and experiences for their customers. The Analytics and A/B Testing services help with these challenges, allowing developers to spend more time creating content, reviewing performance and building exciting new experiences for their customers. The services are easy to integrate into new and existing apps and games, with most implementations taking less than a day. Since the backend infrastructure is managed by Amazon, developers can focus on the reports and information they receive to optimize their apps appropriately.
Analytics - the Analytics service provides usage metrics on daily and monthly active devices, sessions, retention, and in-app purchase revenue. These metrics are updated continually and are available within 60 minutes of the data being received. When using this service, developers can quickly assess how, for example, launch day is going or how a new feature might be affecting retention.
A/B Testing - the A/B Testing service allows mobile developers to simultaneously test up to five different in-app experiences to understand which experience is most successful based on conversion, clicks, or other criteria they define. A developer simply needs to integrate the SDK and the service handles all of the complex statistical calculations on behalf of the developer. The service then presents the results in a simple web dashboard that shows which experience is most effective and statistically significant.
"Mobile developers really want to understand how customers are using their app," said Mike George, Vice President of Amazon Appstore, Games and Cloud Drive. "We've spent years at Amazon using data, analytics, and A/B testing to continually improve the experience of customers who shop with us. We wanted to bring those same advanced tools to mobile app developers to help them improve their customers' experience."