Blog and News > analytics > Google Offers New Analytics Tool for Google Cast Developers
Google Offers New Analytics Tool for Google Cast Developers
Google has announced a new analytics tool to help developers of the Google Cast software. Google Cast helps people to stream media from their PCs and even mobile devices to a TV or a speaker set-up.
The Google Cast SDK has been available for some time now and has been expanded to offer dedicated pages for analytics to improve the feature set of apps which work with the software.
In a similar fashion to Google Analytics, which is purely for websites, Google Cast’s analytics will help people to check the performance of their apps and see user habits. The analytics information can be found under the ‘View’ link in the Statistics column for their Google Cast app. It will let developers see the number of devices which have launched the app, the number of sessions (totalled across devices) and the average playback length. This information can be broken down by geographic area, operating system and time periods.
A Significant Upgrade
The app is a big upgrade for people who have been supporting Google Cast over the last few years. The earliest SDKs were quite limited and did not offer developers a way to measure usage with first-party tools. Now Google Cast works with Chromecast, Android TVs and Cast-enabled speakers, and it has several new APIs and even plug-ins for Unity.
Google is competing against several other smart-device makers. Yahoo recently added support for Apple TV to its Flurry Analytics tool, and Twitter’s analytics tool also added Apple TV support in January. Developers have been calling for analytics support on Chromecast and other similar devices, and Google was long overdue in adding it, especially given Apple’s recent moves to support developers.
Devices such as Chromecast and Apple TV are a clear sign of how the world is becoming increasingly connected, and how the average user does not think in terms of apps or websites. They want to be able to access their Spotify collection anywhere, watch videos from YouTube, communicate with their friends and enjoy their online life without having to think about what device they are using. Manufacturers and developers that provide a seamless experience within their platforms and their apps will be the ones that will capture the most users and customers. Being able to see usage and engagement figures only makes the job of catering to your customers easier.
Tim
