Incredibly popular beta application distribution platform Testflight has been acquired by Burstly and is launching a new product called TestFlight Live, reports MG Siegler at Pando Daily. The new product is a live analytics platform similar to Chartbeat or Google Analytics Realtime, but for apps. And the best part of it is that TestFlight developers don’t actually have to install any new code at all in their apps to start using it.
The acquisition apparently happened at the end of last year, with the app mediaton platform Burstly grabbing themselves a beta testing app and what looks to be a great analytics product in one swoop.
The TestFlight Live product looks to be an interesting one. It shows an immense array of data about apps and their audiences. Developers will be able to log crashes in the apps, with symbolicated crash reports, they can see how much time people spend inside an app and how often they come back to it after install. There is a realtime dashboard that shows the visitors that are in your apps every minute of the day and it works on mobile devices as well.
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Developers can also insert checkpoints into modules of their apps, to see which features are the most popular and break those stats down by device and OS version. This looks to be one of the most seriously feature-rich analytics products out there for iOS developers.
If you’re unfamiliar with TestFlight, it’s a platform that developers can use to distribute beta apps outside of the Apple App Store test device system. That system is incredibly limited, with only 100 devices allowed and draconian device removal policies that make it tough for developers to offer extensiv betas. TestFlight frees them from those limitations and allows them to push out beta apps to all of their testers in a unified environment and provides a simple installation dashboard. It’s all very well done.
This acquisition makes sense for a company like Burstly, who is interested in optimizing ad placement and gathering detailed statistics about apps to offer the most effective ad buys. It also makes for an enormous improvement to the TestFlight platform, and one that is sure to have huge adoption because it uses the exact same TestFlight SDK as the beta service does. This means that many of TestFlight’s 70,000 developers will likely activate the service just for kicks, and I’d be surprised if they weren’t impressed by the breadth of data available.
If you’re a developer interested in TestFlight Live, you can check it out here. The service is completely free for now and the basic features will always be free, with the company looking for ways to monetize with premium features down the road.
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