Swift Setup Guide

Prerequisites

This guide assumes you have already created a TelemetryDeck account. If you haven’t yet, please sign up now!

Installing the Swift Package

The TelemetryDeck Swift package uses Swift Package Manager.

1. Open Xcode and navigate to the project you want to add TelemetryDeck to.
2. In the menu, select File -> Add Packages…. This will open the Swift Package Manager view.
3. Paste https://github.com/TelemetryDeck/SwiftClient into the search field.
4. Select the SwiftClient package that appears in the list
5. Set the Dependency Rule to Up to Next Major Version.
6. Click Add Package.

This will include the TelemetryDeck Swift Client into your app by downloading the source code. Feel free to browse the client’s source code, it’s tiny and you’ll see for yourself how TelemetryDeck is hashing user identifiers before they ever reach the server. Privacy, yay!

Including the package in your target

Xcode will ask you to link the package with your target in the next screen, titles Choose Package Products for SwiftClient. Select the TelemetryClient library and click Add Package.

Initializing the TelemetryDeck Swift Package

The TelemetryClient package will provide you with a class TelemetryManager that you’ll use for all interactions with TelemetryDeck. Before you can use that class, you’ll need to initialize it at the start of your app. We strongly recommend doing so as soon as possible, as you won’t be able to send Signals before the TelemetryManager is initialized.

This is slightly different depending on whether you use SwiftUI or UIKit’s AppDelegate to manage your app’s lifecycle, so let’s look at these individually.

You only need one way of initializing the TelemetryDeck SDK, either SwiftUI/SceneKit or AppDelegate. If your app is new, you’ll likely want to use SwiftUI/SceneKit.

Initialization with SwiftUI

For Scene-based SwiftUI applications, we recommend adding the initialization to your @main App struct! Open YourAppNameApp.swift and look for code that looks like this:

import SwiftUI

@main
struct Example_AppApp: App {
    var body: some Scene {
        WindowGroup {
            ContentView()
        }
    }
}

This is the entry point to your app. Now let’s add the initialization here.

Import the TelemetryClient Package by adding import TelemetryClient. Then add an init() method to your App struct that creates a TelemetryManagerConfiguration instance and hands it to the TelemetryManager, using the Unique Identifier of your app that you copied into your clipboard earlier. If you don’t have that anymore, you can get it at any time from the TelemetryDeck Dashboard.

Your code should now look like this:

import SwiftUI
import TelemetryClient

@main
struct Example_AppApp: App {
    var body: some Scene {
        WindowGroup {
            ContentView()
        }
    }

    init() {
        let configuration = TelemetryManagerConfiguration(
            appID: "YOUR-APP-UNIQUE-IDENTIFIER")
        TelemetryManager.initialize(with: configuration)
    }
}

If you already have an init() method, add the two lines to its end.

Your app is now ready. You can skip the AppDelegate part if you’re using SwiftUI and SceneKit.

Initialization in an AppDelegate based app

If you use AppDelegate to manage your app’s life cycle, open the file AppDelegate.swift and look for the method application(:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:). It will probably look similar to this:

import UIKit

@main
class AppDelegate: UIResponder, UIApplicationDelegate {
    func application(_ application: UIApplication, didFinishLaunchingWithOptions launchOptions: [UIApplication.LaunchOptionsKey: Any]?) -> Bool {
        // Override point for customization after application launch.
        return true
    }

    // ...
}

By default, Xcode even adds a comment here to tell you where to add stuff that should happen right after launch.

Now, import the TelemetryClient package and configure the TelemetryManager using the Unique Identifier of your app that you copied into your clipboard earlier. If you don’t have that anymore you can get it at any time from the TelemetryDeck Dashboard.

import UIKit
import TelemetryClient

@main
class AppDelegate: UIResponder, UIApplicationDelegate {
    func application(_ application: UIApplication, didFinishLaunchingWithOptions launchOptions: [UIApplication.LaunchOptionsKey: Any]?) -> Bool {

        let configuration = TelemetryManagerConfiguration(
            appID: "YOUR-APP-UNIQUE-IDENTIFIER")
        TelemetryManager.initialize(with: configuration)

        return true
    }
    // ...
}

If you already have code in this function, add the two new lines to the end.

You are now ready to send signals!

Sending signals

Let’s send a signal to show the app has launched correctly.

See the TelemetryDeck SDK’s README.md file for more information on how to send signals. For now, let’s just send one signal that tells us the app has launched. Go to the place where you just added the initialization, and directly below add this line:

let configuration = TelemetryManagerConfiguration(appID: "YOUR-APP-UNIQUE-IDENTIFIER")
TelemetryManager.initialize(with: configuration)

TelemetryManager.send("applicationDidFinishLaunching")

And done. This is all you need to send a signal. You do not need to keep an instance of TelemetryManager and hand it around, just call the send function on the class directly. If you want to add a custom user identifer or metadata payload, add them to the function call like this:

TelemetryManager.send(
    "applicationDidFinishLaunching",
    for: "my very cool user",
    with: [
        "numberOfTimesPizzaModeHasActivated": "\(dataStore.pizzaMode.count)",
        "pizzaCheeseMode": "\(dataStore.pizzaCheeseMode)"
    ])

And you’re done! You are now sending signals to the TelemetryDeck server.

Fill out Apple’s app privacy details

Last thing you need to do before you can send signals is going through Apple’s privacy details. This informs your users about what data is collected, and how it is collected.

Also TelemetryDeck is privacy friendly, and we only handle not personally identifiable information, you still need to click through the privacy details.

We have a handy guide where we go over each step that is required.

You’re all set!

You can now send signals! Don’t overdo it in the beginning. It’s okay if you only send one signal, named applicationDidFinishLaunching in the beginning. This will already give you number of users, number of launches, retention… a lot!

After a while, you can add a send call for each screen in your app, so you can see which screens your users use most. It’s also recommended to add all your custom settings to your metadata each time (except the ones that might identify an individual user please). This way you can see which settings most of your users use.