data.ai (formerly App Annie) is a mobile data and analytics platform designed to help customers create winning mobile experiences and achieve excellence. Founded in 2010, the company launched their mobile market data solution and in 2019 acquired Libring, an advertising monetization and spend offering, to expand their capabilities and comprise a complete mobile performance platform. The vendor boasts more than 1,100 enterprise clients and 1 million registered users across all geographies and…
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Firebase Crashlytics
Score 8.1 out of 10
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Crashlytics is a mobile analytics tool which helps users find the exact line of code that their app crashed on, providing granular insight into mobile app performance and user experience. Crashlytics was acquired by Google in 2017 and is now offered as part of the Firebase product.
I think that App Annie will be handy for the companies that provide service in multiple countries - so they have to deal with local competitors research and track the performance of the app (by the position and by the reviews) in different stores. I think that for a one-country app, many of the features will be less relevant. At the same time, App Annie offers custom plans, so I see how the user experience can be different.
Crashlytics is almost a defacto standard in the Android world for tracking crashes in the field. I've used it on the last 4 Android projects I've been on. It's not as helpful on iOS' stacktraces but I'm not sure if anything would be better because iOS stack traces are from ObjC code which is not as useful as Java stacktraces.
App Annie is extremely limited if you are on the free plan. While you can garner some golden nuggets from the free plan, it's extremely difficult to make needle moving decisions based on the free data. It would be great if App Annie would disclose pricing on their website, plus have a non-free/enterprise plan were you could pick and choose features they offer.
After nearly considering a paid plan with App Annie, I decided not to purchase because of the broken trust that stemmed from their sales team. I often got cold-calls from their reps - even when I never contacted them for a sales member to call me. I was bombarded for about 2 weeks straight with phone calls and hard-core sales emails with just asking to talk, no questions or personalization. This cold, unwanted and unwelcome outreach solidified my decision not to purchase.
Well the fact that the freemium features are all that I need right now, I will most definitely continue to use it on a daily basis. I might upgrade to the pro version in the future if I need more data than what I am getting now. But for now it works great for what I need.
I have not had to contact support a lot of times. The few times I did, I got correct and lengthy responses, but they took some time to answer. Their product is very complete, so unless you have a specific question, you will probably not need to contact support at any time.
We use Google 360 and are able to do a much deeper dive into the activity we see on our apps. I think App Annie is a great starting point product, but for more in depth analytics, something like a Google 360 or Adobe might be better.
As mentioned previously, the only realistic competitor to Crashlytics is Instabug (backed by Y Combinator in the W16 class). While Crashlytics is focused on actual crashes, Instabug's main innovation is in collecting feedback from users for non-crash bugs. While non-crash bugs are a substantial category of bugs, Instabug's pricing is quite steep. As soon as you go beyond the most basic features your monthly bill spikes to $124 - $499 per month, whereas Crashlytics is 100% free (for all usage levels and all enterprise features). Based on this, I've never tried Instabug because the ROI just wasn't there.
App Annie has had neither a positive nor negative impact on our ROI or business objectives. Our team currently uses their free, very limited plan for data discrepancy with our main ASO tool. Otherwise, we have connected our apps and let the data flow in. We go in the account about once every 2-3 months.
With App Annie's data we have solidified that our other paid ASO tool we use has accurate data and that we will continue to pay for that tool. So in that regards, App Annie's provided us with a confirmation in our competitor ASO tool purchase decision.
