From App Center to TelemetryDeck — Panic’s analytics upgrade story
The amazing people at Panic share their experience with TelemetryDecks app analytics and their thoughts on privacy.
Panic Inc. is that rare kind of studio every app developer secretly admires — the one that started out making Mac tools (Transmit, Nova) and somehow ended up publishing Untitled Goose Game and building its own handheld console with a crank.
Founded in Portland by the indie developers Cabel and Steven, Panic has spent decades doing whatever looks fun and slightly unhinged. They jumped from building utilities for nerds to funding games that win BAFTAs, all while keeping the same “let’s build cool stuff and see what happens” energy.
Their Playdate console is a bright yellow love letter to creativity, complete with a real crank for gameplay. If you’ve ever dreamt of making weird, delightful, slightly over-engineered things — Panic is your spirit animal.
Some of Panic's products are:
Transmit
Maintain your web sites and back up important files.
Transmit is the gold standard of macOS file transfer apps. For over 25 years, it has helped hundreds of thousands of professionals and hobbyists alike to maintain their websites and back up their important files.
Nova
Native Mac code editor.
Nova is a native Mac code editor that's fast and amazing. Built with the same file-transfer technology as Transmit, thousands of users rely on Nova every day for their projects.
Prompt
SSH on the go
Prompt is SSH on the go. Sysadmins all over the world use Prompt to log into their servers wherever they are, whether on iPhone or iPad, and then sync their connections to Prompt for Mac when they’re back at the office.
Playdate
Make virtual playdates more fun!
The Playdate simulator is an app for Mac, Windows, and Linux that allows game developers to easily test their Playdate games. Playdate Mirror is an app for the same operating systems that allow users to connect their playdates to their computers to play on a bigger screen.
Picking an analytics service that supports multiple platforms
The developers at Panic discovered TelemetryDeck through the Mac community.
“When we asked about analytics platforms on social media, many Mac developers told us that they had the best experience with TelemetryDeck.”
Panic develops for a wide range of platforms — not just mobile frameworks like Swift and Kotlin, but also Windows, Linux, and Unity — yet its users still access their products almost exclusively on the Mac.
Panic is happy to fulfill customer’s compliance requests automatically
The fact that TelemetryDeck is based in the EU proved to be a real advantage — especially in a world where privacy and EU-US data transfer rules are under increasing scrutiny. When a European-based company recently asked Panic whether any of its third-party data processors were located outside the EU, Panic could confidently respond: “none at all.” Check. ✅
Serving special use cases with TelemetryDeck’s open-source SDK
For the most part, switching apps to user tracking with TelemetryDeck was easy for Panic’s developers. On the Mac, they had encapsulated all of Panics analytics code into a single class, and all they had to do to get TelemetryDeck running was replace the implementation of two small methods in that class. Easy.
There was one caveat, however. Panic’s previous analytics providers had all supported any type that could be encoded using NSJSONSerialization. In practice, this meant that Panic used to send number values in some of their analytics payloads, but TelemetryDeck requires them to all be strings.
This wouldn’t have been a problem if all of Panic’s code was written in Swift. However, there was some older Objective-C code that ended up attempting to send an NSNumber at runtime in a way that was not caught at all by the compiler. As a result, the application threw a runtime exception, crashing Transmit when users performed certain actions. This required Panic to issue an emergency update.
To prevent that issue in the future, TelemetryDeck is committing to updating their SDKs and APIs to allow for non-string data types.
Analytics for WxWidgets
Panic had some very specific requirements for their cross-platform setup, and TelemetryDeck was flexible enough to meet them. Extending analytics support to Panic’s Playdate apps on Windows and Linux took a bit of extra work — while TelemetryDeck offers SDKs for those platforms, none were built for the particular UI library Panic uses: WxWidgets.
Fortunately, because TelemetryDeck’s SDKs are open source, the team could easily inspect how HTTPS requests are structured and build their own WxWidgets integration from scratch — no roadblocks, no compromises.
TelemetryDeck has powerful charts
Once everything was set up, TelemetryDeck’s charts turned out to be far more powerful than anything Panic had used before — and that’s saying something, considering their switch from App Center.
The ability to chart relative protocol usage in Transmit over time has been a game-changer. Other analytics tools only offered a static pie chart of current usage, forcing Panic to create separate graphs for each protocol to see trends. With TelemetryDeck, all that complexity disappears — the data just works, beautifully and intuitively.
Using the data
Panic uses TelemetryDeck’s data to make practical, engineering-driven decisions — mostly to spot oddities, bottlenecks, or parts of the app that aren’t behaving the way they should.
TelemetryDeck’s time-series charts, combined with its strict GDPR compliance, have been especially useful during development. And since Panic isn’t in the business of optimizing for things like session length or retention curves, they focus on the signals that actually matter for tools: where features slow down, where workflows break, and where users bail out because something feels off.
The analytics data helps Panic shave off friction and improve how the app behaves under real-world use. We are incredibly proud that Panic Inc. is taking TelemetryDeck along their journey!