Basic usage statistics

[danmichaelo]

I believe we should be able to at least give some sort of answer to the question "How much is the app used?"

It's preferable to avoid having to make additional web requests to do this (at least without asking the user). Therefore my suggestion is that we just do the search through a proxy server which does the logging. We should probably discuss what to log, but I suggest something basic like

• timestamp of the request
• system (android/ios...) and version
• app version
• type of search (barcode or text)

In addition we could add a anonymized phone identifier to find the number of unique users, average number of requests per user, etc..

What do you think?

[danmichaelo]

Ok, so I think getting the app version is quite important since it tells us if people upgrade or not, but if we define it more than one place we will forget to update it some place or the other. With Cordova 3 the version is defined in www/config.xml, and populated to the android manifest and ios project file on build – which is good. But to my surprise there seems to be no way to access the version number from javascript. Frustrated, I ended up writing a cordova plugin last evening that I wrapped up today... Probably not the best use of time, but anyway :P We can add it once the project is ported to Cordova 3.
https://github.com/danmichaelo/cordova-plugin-appinfo