Others have speculated about the specifics of it and they probably know more than I do. But if the data did come directly from Apple and Google, they wouldn't need to be sharing any data about the users, just how many there are.
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Apple Tops Holiday Sales With 44% of All New Device Activations
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Others have speculated about the specifics of it and they probably know more than I do. But if the data did come directly from Apple and Google, they wouldn't need to be sharing any data about the users, just how many there are.
You don't need a base number for this. This is about relative performance. Of all the devices sold this holiday, 44% were iPhones. I think that's a meaningful number.
You only need a base number to figure out whether "growth" is meaningful, not relative performance.
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you don't need a total device number for relative performance figures. That's the whole point of relative performance!
In fact, the total device number would be distracting because how does anyone know what is a good number of devices to sell a year? Relative data like tells us specifically about market share in a specific period. That is very meaningful (if collected correctly).
Either go to their site: flurry.com. Google App analytics (I believe there are some relevant wiki pages).
Or refer back to my previous post which gives a basic explanation: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...vice-activations.2024229/page-4#post-24125731
But in short Flurry provide analytics tools/ad monetisation tracking which App Devs integrate into their Apps to assist with debugging/retention/user behaviour analysis/monetisation through ads. And that includes some popular Apps, I believe they list Snapchat on their site under customers.
Is it just iPad and iPhone sales they give?
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I guess I was assuming that not giving watch sales numbers translated to other items, guess I was wrong there...
I don't know if they produce their numbers at other times (not really interested in that aspect of their data). Usually if the manufacturer produces numbers, third parties will only release their inferred numbers in cases where the manufacturers numbers may not be reliable. For example where a manufacturer counts shipments to retailers as sales. Otherwise its largely a pointless exercise when there's a more reliable data set available.
In the absence of manufacturers own data such inferred data, where there is likely to be a strong correlation, is useful for shareholders/investors/market analysts/etc. Say Apple and Samsung were the other way around this year, you may well have seen a dump of Apple stock. It may also have pushed them to release their own numbers.
For Flurry themselves its a marketing exercise of course. Whilst you may be sceptical, Flurry's core business is collection and dissemination of data. Moreover, they are also heavily involved in ad tracking/monetisation, so advertisers rely on them to track impressions/clicks. Therefore, I doubt they would engage in any nefarious activity for the sake of a bit of publicity. If caught it would call into question their credibility which would impact their core business. If they've released these figures, they must believe they are representative.
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Yep, there are now tons of app/ad/sales analytic tools out there -- marketing drives sales and business. So there are plenty of incentive for them to claim to know something they really don't.
They could publish their quarterly data which then can be compared against smartphone OEM's quarterly and settle this credibility debate once and for all, but Flurry probably wouldn't want to do that (and risk their reputation), right? There are plenty of folks who want to know the true activation numbers out there which only Apple/Google insiders are privy to. But, now, that's something that would definitely offend Google/Apple (and their investors). Apple does go after smartphones analysts time to time, though it never discourages any from publishing their next guesstimate every year.
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So they're more spyware than anything else by the sounds of it. I never understood this obsession to spy on users. If you want to know my thoughts or opinions on your app then pay me. My opinion isn't free.
I'm not sure if that's an actual thing that's being tracked, registering IMEI numbers on an LTE network.
