🎷 [Important] How should we handle analytics?

[Myzel394]

I'd like to add analytics to Locus. But no worries, I don't want to add Google Analytics or any other privacy infringing analytics - I want to add privacy-friendly analytics that require users to opt-in.
Having at least some analytics would help me massively finding out what's most important to you users and I can see where the app works fine and where not.

Based on that I'd like to add two criteria for any analytics:

• Both the analytics frontend as well as the backend must be open source
• The backend must be self-hostable (I will probably host the backend myself)

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be many free privacy-friendly analytics tools available for Flutter. So far, I have only found:

• Plausible Analytics

If you know any other analytics tool or have anything else to say to this discussion, please comment here.

I'll leave this issue open for some time to give you guys some time to comment and discuss.

[Blaumaus]

Hi, founder of Swetrix here.

Feel free to give us a try to our service, we are:

1. Fully open-source (that includes both Frontend and Backend, as well as other services like CDN, Extension marketplace, CAPTCHA service, etc.).
2. Swetrix itself is not linked to any platform. You can analyse your traffic on web, mobile, desktop or any other apps by using our APIs.
   For example, here's a Java wrapper that can be used to analyse desktop apps.
   We're currently working on a library that can be used to track React Native applications and I can send you a wrapper compatible with Flutter as well.
3. Swetrix is self-hostable. We offer our service as a Docker container hosted on Docker Hub. Although the documentation is missing a few points (I'm working on it at the moment, it should be fixed this week). I'm also planning to record a video on how to easily self-host Swetrix.
   If you decide to use the Cloud version of you service - the prices start from $5 / mo for 10k events (+ 14 days trial period).

We're not that popular, unfortunately, but our service is battle-tested, it exists for more than 2 years already.

Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions, I'll be happy to help you out.

Cheers!

[Myzel394]

@Blaumaus Swetrix looks very interesting! Unfortunately I could not find any wrapper for Flutter, could you send me the link to it?

[Wjxfi]

Cosmic-Ide/Cosmic-IDE@c1fbae1 www.piratepx.com/

[Myzel394]

@Wjxfi while I think the idea itself is very cool and I may use that in a future project (thanks for the recommendation!), it's unfortunately not enough for me to properly determine what users want. I need things such as the operating system, what actions have been done, etc.. But you do not need to be worried about privacy infringing analytics, I'm not interested in that stuff. Analytics will also be opt-in, so if you want absolutely no tracking, you do not need to opt in! :D

[Wjxfi]

vishal2376/git-coach#3 (comment)

[IzzySoft]

Thanks for all chiming in! I just added Swetrix & Plausible to my corresponding list 😍

[Myzel394]

@IzzySoft next time I need to get some information, I'll have to check out your list first definitely xD The only problem (for me at least) is, that I couldn't find it by using a search engine, maybe you want to host your own website with better SEO than GitLab has, so more people could see your list? Also, I did not know that you could host Sentry yourself! Since Sentry kind of seems to be the "standard" for analytics, I might go with it for Locus (opt in of course)

[IzzySoft]

I was thinking about moving it to my wiki (or F-Droid's), which would also make maintenance easier. But then the comments would be lost. Maybe I'll do that one day, leaving just a pointer in that snippet (so no existing links break) and link back there from the wiki for comments. If I'm not mistaken, wikis have "better SEO" 🙈