Countly’s the most complete release ever: 16.02 with web Analytics, tvOS & Watch OS 2 support

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Countly

5 min readFeb 19, 2016

After 6 months of hard work, Countly Enterprise Edition and Community Edition version 16.02 are here, and they are packed with a lot of new features. As you all know, we have already been providing sophisticated, flexible, and easy-to-use mobile analytics capabilities for apps via an easy-to-use interface. By greatly simplifying the tracking and analysis of in-app activity, Countly users can focus on important issues like improving in-app usability and user experience, increasing retention retention, and boosting in-app revenue.

We haven’t been resting on our laurels though. We have continued to enhance Countly as a 360 degree mobile & web analytics and marketing solution for product managers, marketing managers and developers, and we are proud of the results.

Let’s see what we have with this new release:

Countly can now track web pages (in detail)

The biggest change in this release is the addition of web analytics, something we have been working on for a while. In order to make web analytics a reality, we first developed a complete web SDK. This SDK has also been used in several mobile applications as well, since many apps out there are written in Javascript.

Note that, unlike some other vendors, instead of just providing custom events and basic data retrieved from Javascript SDKs, the Countly dashboard shows you a LOT of information about your web page, including but not limited to:

All sites overview
Heatmaps (*)
Javascript crash reporting
Custom events
Bounces, exits and entries
Page views
Last visiting users
Geolocations
Bot tracker removal
Browsers and devices
Time spent on pages
Segmentation (*)
User profiles (*)
Attribution analytics (campaign tracking) (*)
Funnel visualization (*)
Drill down granular data (*)

(*) denotes that feature is available in the Enterprise Edition

Web analytics is now publicly available for all editions. For more information about web analytics, please click this link, or see installation instructions on the resources page.

Support for WatchOS2 and TVOS

The Countly iOS SDK already had support for WatchOS, but now it’s time for WatchOS2. We also have been asked several times for TVOS, and now you can grab it via the same iOS repository on Github. Available for all editions, now you can get custom data from WatchOS2 devices and your Apple TV.

That means, iOS SDK now supports 4 types of platforms in a single SDK: iOS, tvOS, Watch OS and Mac OS.

Other updates with iOS SDK include:

Manual and auto view tracking capability
WatchOS 2 & tvOS support
Changing and merging device ID at runtime
Custom or system provided device IDs (IDFA, IDFV, OpenUDID)
Added crash reporting and user details tests
Updated iOS sample app for APM (hint, hint!)
Updated OS X sample app
Added tvOS & watchOS 2 sample apps
Updated sample apps for view tracking

Extensive Enhancements for the Push Notifications Plugin

ush plugin now uses new HTTP/2 interface which Apple has introduced during WWDC 2015 and recently made public. Old TLS socket-based interface is going to be deprecated.

This interface also makes possible the use of single certificate for development & production environments. While old certificates will still work, you’re strongly advised to generate new one and upload it to your Countly dashboard.

In this release, Countly now shows error message in the message popup in case of any unrecoverable error during message sending. There are also numerous bug fixes to provide you with a smoother user experience.

Other notable features

This release was really big. Features that deserve a notable mention are as follows:

Application Types, where each app has different views and dashboards depending on whether it is a web app, a mobile app or (very soon) an IoT app.
Upgrade to MongoDB 3 and Nodejs 5 for better API handling speed & performance.
Sources plugin showing the sources of your web visitors or the appstore from which of an Android app was installed.
User Profiles are now greatly enhanced, allowing segmenting users, and a user list view from drill, crashes and attribution plugins. You can also store custom properties as arrays, for multiple values, as well as provide atomic server operations, like increase, max or min. (Enterprise Edition)
Attribution Analytics is now more advanced and allows tracking of custom segments with Attribution Analytics. (Enterprise Edition)
Lots of new shell commands for managing plugins, changing configurations, and additional backup options have arrived. You can pretty much manage Countly from command line (we’re calling you, Linux’ers).
Views plugin for tracking the time which a user spent on specific application view/screen/page, either automatically or custom.
Allow Google services to be disabled, for users who live in regions where Google is blocked.
Outgoing emails are also now localized in your own language.
Theme support, so you can bring in your own theme!Download

You can download server and SDKs from usual places:

Looking for supported Enterprise Edition?

We suggest customers looking for a supported Enterprise Analytics Edition or Enterprise Marketing Edition with more features like real-time dashboard, crash reports, attribution & campaign analytics, advanced push notifications, user profiles and detailed segmentation have a look at Enterprise Edition page, compare different editions or get in contact with us for pricing information.

We are really excited to unveil our best platform yet with a changelog full of new features. Together, let’s build world’s most extensive, user-centric and powerful mobile analytics platform. Join us now and share the love.

Until next release … Enjoy! :-)

– Countly Dev Team (Artem, Arturs, Erkan, Igor, Kirill & Onur)