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If I create a OSS app with analytics to detect & log crashes with feature use, is it a bad practice? (self.opensource)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by catalog3115 to c/[email protected]

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If I create a OSS app with analytics to detect & log crashes with feature use, is it a bad practice? I think analytics is really helpful in finding:-

which features are worth developing &
which bugs needs to be solved first.

Edit...

Things Collected

IP Address for use ping (for country)
All crashes with IP
Feature use with IP Crashes are store for upto 6 months to solve bug but rest are collected and delete after 3 months

It is opt-out but user are informed about it during first / install time. To disable analytics Settings --> Privacy

I want to know right way to introduce analytics in OSS

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[–] catalog3115 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Or offer two variants of the app, one normal and one without. Or let people like F-Droid offer the latter.

I like the idea of providing two variant one normal & another without any analytics whatsoever on F-Droid. Users can create a issue/support ticket on GitHub providing logs themselves. Their app will not even ping back whatsoever.

I will create app with analytics with a compile switch so analytics part is not even compiled and completely stripped from the build

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Yeah, the maintainers of F-Droid will probably appreciate you did the work for them.

And I think it's a sound approach. I mean the Linux ecosystem works the same way. We have upstream developers, and distributions and maintainers who adapt the packages for the user. We can have all the diversity, modern tools and also distributions like Debian that swich everything to privacy per default because their users like that. I think the same approach works for android and I really appreciate I get to choose between F-Droid, Obtanium and the Google Play store.