iPhone Google Analytics - identifying unique users

Question

I'm in the process of adding Google Analytics to my iPhone app, but I'm not at all experienced with Analytics. One thing I would like it to tell me is how many unique people are using the app.

Suppose one user were to use her iPhone app on ten different wireless networks, would Google Analytics iOS SDK interpret this as ten different users? What identifies a unique user - the device ID, an IP address?

Thanks for any help! Tristan

Answer 1

If you' concerned about the accuracy of google analytics data you can use a visitor scope custom variable with some unique id to uniquely identify someone. You may not however use any personally identifying information (eg. email address or UDID). I am currently using a random but persistant id created inside the app. This however will not solve the issue of an uninstall and reinstall. For our purposes however we are not too concerned about that.

Answer 2

If the one phone uses the app from two different networks, it still counts as one user.

It would seem the iOS Analytics SDK just sends a cookie (not actually stored in [NSHTTPCookieStorage sharedHTTPCookieStorage]) with the request to identify that it's the same person.

edit: Turns out this is wrong. Our google analytics profile has twice as many "absolute unique visitors" as we have devices. We haven't released the tracked version yet.

edit2: It appears that when you delete the app, then reinstall it, Analytics will count two absolute unique visitors. When you simply install a new version over an old one however, Analytics will only count one absolute unique visitor.

Answer 3

My understanding is that Apple won't allow applications to collect identifying data from the iPhone, so it would be impossible to uniquely identify the user.