FAQ about mobile/desktop app tracking

[daniel-lerch]

There are many issues about better support for mobile app tracking but no activity. As I am just asking for better documentation and not for any changes I opened another issue.

I am sure it's possible to track mobile and desktop apps with Matomo, although some useful features are still missing. However, there is barely any documentation about it.

• @tsteur wrote a blog in 2012 but Matomo offers much more features now.
• @brototyp mentioned in Improvements for mobile platforms #13093 that he has experience with the iOS SDK and I suspect also with its usage.
• @starmessage is developing a desktop analytics platform with Matomo as an endpoint and mentioned some ideas in Consider adding AppName, AppVersion in the dimensions #16027 to make his approach to save data the default.

I mentioned all these names because I hope there is someone who can explain when to use action name and categories or events and which kind of custom dimensions are useful. If no one of you wants to write an FAQ about mobile and desktop tracking, I would like to do that but I don't know enough Matomo yet.

In my opinion having tracking SDKs for all languages is not that important because building your own query parameters is a matter of a few minutes once you know which parameters to use. However, to know that and being able to either use an SDK or raw HTTP request, developers have to understand Matomo's tracking features in detail. For websites it is very well documented when to use which tracking feature but for mobile or desktop application it is not clear to me.

[Findus23]

There is https://developer.matomo.org/guides/tracking-api-clients which lists all official Matomo SDKs (including the iOS and the Android SDK) and links to their documentation. I think a short summary of this is also displayed when adding a new site to Matomo.

[daniel-lerch]

I am aware of this guide but it does not help me. The SDKs are not more than stateful wrappers around the HTTP Tracking API.

What I am missing is an example which explains how to misuse Matomo's web analytics features to track a native application which does not have an URL, might crash with an exception, has to configure a custom user agent, etc.

Something like this blog by @tsteur in an up to date version would be great.