Press Kit for TelemetryDeck

TelemetryDeck is a new service that helps app and web developers improve their product by supplying immediate, accurate telemetry data while users use your app. And the best part: It's all anonymized so your users' data stays private!

TelemetryDeck is a service that helps app providers improve their product by supplying immediate, accurate usage data while users use your app. The best part: All data gets anonymized, so the users stay private.

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What is TelemetryDeck?

TelemetryDeck is a service that lets you track events, called Signals, in your applications. Through statistical analysis, developers who use TelemetryDeck can see live user numbers, know what features are used most, get retention statistics, all the things that a good analytics package should provide.

For us at TelemetryDeck it's especially important that

  • we do not enable identification of individual persons
  • we protect the privacy of the app users
  • we are focused on apps
  • we provide a solution that is easy to install and easy to use

What do you do with TelemetryDeck?

Right now, we're focusing on analyzing the data of iOS and Android apps, plus web apps. There are signal sending libraries for Swift and JavaScript; but even without them, any app that can send an HTTP request can send Signals to TelemetryDeck.

The data TelemetryDeck’s customers collect can be viewed in our web dashboard (a web app). We also offer an iOS app and a macOS app. Both of them are open source and publicly available on GitHub.

Walking Through the App

After logging in, users can see the apps they are managing in TelemetryDeck, and select one to view its Insights.

Immediately, users will see their Insights, categorized into groups. These insights are calculated live, so every new user is immediately visible.

Selecting an Insight or creating a new one brings up the editor. Here, users can directly change how an Insight queries TelemetryDeck's Signal database and see live results.

TelemetryDeck shows Insights

Insights are incredibly versatile: They can count either Signals or Users (or, soon, sessions). They can be restricted to specific signal types, such as "the app launched" or "the user did x". They can be filtered by their metadata, e.g. only show signals from iOS, or a specific app version.

They can show a breakdown of all available values for a given metadata key; this makes it easy to e.g. show what percentage of an app's users have a feature enabled or which platform the app is used on the most.

Time-wise, insights can group their signals by hour, day, week or month, allowing for either fine-grained view or a good overview.

Finally, all insights can display their data as a table, as bar or line chart, or as a donut or pie chart. All this configuration can be changed and experimented with on the fly and allows developers who use TelemetryDeck to deep dive into their data quickly and easily.

Why did we create TelemetryDeck?

There are other analytics packages for apps out there, but none that protect the app users' privacy. Most of them are well-known to gobble up all the data they can find about users of apps they are embedded in. By contrast, TelemetryDeck is anonymized in such a way that developers won't even have to throw up one of these annoying GDPR-consent dialogs, because the collected data is not connectable to privately identifiable information.

Privacy is cool, and there are other analytics packages that target privacy. It's just that they are either not focused on apps, but on websites, or are very difficult to use efficiently. We know both sides: App development and server development. We also have a lot of experience with privacy-friendly design and Big Data. So we're ideally positioned to bring something new to the table here.

Who is this for?

The target audience of TelemetryDeck is anyone who provides an app. TelemetryDeck can be used to analyze iOS apps, Android apps and web apps. We have a full list of SDK's here.

The collected data can be accessed in a web app quite conveniently in the browser. We also have an iOS and a macOS app whose code we provide open source. You can learn more about it here.

TelemetryDeck scales for companies of all sizes. We have our pricing models outlined here. However, we are also happy to put together custom packages.

Who is Creating TelemetryDeck?

Hello, we are Daniel and Lisa - the team that founded TelemetryDeck. We've been friends for a few years and have also worked together on apps before. We founded TelemetryDeck together in spring 2021, after Daniel had already been working on the software since summer 2020.

Daniel Jilg, born in 1984, is a native of Augsburg. He has been an iOS developer for over 10 years and had one of the first 100 apps in the iOS App Store. He is also a server developer with over 15 years of experience with Vapor, Django, Rails, PHP and other server stacks. The two most notable privacy-related products he has led the development of are Keepsafe Browser and Cliqz Mobile, which now lives on as Ghostery for iOS. In developing Cliqz Mobile, he learned a lot about how to do proper analytics with fully anonymized data. Combined with an earlier open source project of his, a service to manage A/B testing for apps, this led to the idea for TelemetryDeck.

Lisa Figas was born in Dresden in 1985 and has lived in Augsburg since 2005. She has been in the digital scene for about 15 years and has specialized in the topic of privacy through encryption in recent years. Lisa is mainly concerned with the social impact of privacy and surveillance laws. She holds talks on the topic and is active at the EU level as a privacy campaigner.

Data Security and Privacy

TelemetryDeck neither receives nor stores any personal data about the users of apps that include the TelemetryDeck client. Developers can include a hashed custom user identifier or hashed identifierForVendor to detect recurring users, or they can just use a random session identifier to recognize sessions without distinguishing returning users.

Pricing

The usage fee for TelemetryDeck depends on how many signals our servers receive from your app. The calculation is based on full months. There is a free tier for smaller apps and those who want to test TelemetryDeck first. When the threshold of signals is reached, we ask you to upgrade to the next higher plan. You can decide whether you want to pay monthly or annually. You can view the plans here.