At WWDC last year Apple told developers that they’d soon have access to analytics for their apps. On the eve of the 2015 conference the folks in Cupertino have finally made good on that promise, albeit in beta form.

While analytics for applications if far from a new concept, the options on Apple’s platforms have up until now all involved embedding third party libraries at build time and being willing to share your app’s data with the company providing that solution. For both of these reasons the team and I at Armchair Engineering decided not to pursue any of these alternatives, and instead wait and hope Apple would eventually deliver some means of gaining a greater insight into how one’s apps are performing.

Perhaps the best thing about the new analytics package is that not a single line of code is required to enable it, it just works. Upon launching the new dashboard you’ll be greeted with a colourful and graphic-rich overview of your app’s performance.

The data here goes well beyond the standard download and revenue numbers iTunes connect has always offered, providing figures relating to conversion, retention and engagement. The latter probably being the most immediately interesting to a small operation such as ours; its always nice seeing your software finding a place in people’s lives and isn’t simply being deleted moments after installation. Although, as we move forward the conversion information will go a long way to understanding where new customers are coming from and helping to identify areas that can be improved.

One drawback that is probably worth mentioning is that many of these important figures are collected only from devices running iOS 8 and from those users who have opted-in to share their data with app developers during the initial setup of their device (or potentially, although far less likely found and enabled this option in settings - Settings > Privacy > Diagnostics & Usage > Share With App Developers). The good news though is that despite this the number of users who have done this seems to be surprisingly good. For Temperature Converter (the app associated with the data in the screengrab above), Apple reports that in the last 30 days 22 % of users have in fact agreed to share their data. While this number isn’t quite as good for all of our apps, varying between 15 and 25 percent, there’s still plenty of data to be relevant and potentially very useful.