Umeng：A useful analytics tool for mobile developers

From Programmer   Reported by Chang Zheng in Sep 2010

Recently, there have been a lot of reports by major Chinese IT media on “Wandoujia”, known as one of the first few projects that Innovation Works has lunched since founded. However, what is not known to them is “Umeng”, another project that was launched back in May, 2010. Umeng is a tool that helps Chinese mobile developers to gather statistical information about how app users are using their apps. Umeng has been proved to be a very useful and reliable tool. About 30 mobile developers are using Umeng at the moment with 40-50 apps and more than 600,000 end users on Android and iPhone.

According to www.umeng.com, Umeng has the following features. First, it provides real-time feedbacks about app usage to app developers, including the number of online users, the number of times the app has been run and the frequency of user activities. Second, Umeng allows the app developer to customize the contents of feedbacks for every single app he has developed. In this way, app developer can have a deep understanding of how his users are dealing with a specific app. Third, Umeng is totally free and easy to use. Developers just have to modify some of the code lines in his app and the information sent back by Umeng will provide up-to-date running logs of the app running on different devices and different operation systems. These features make Umeng highly appreciated by experienced app developers. According to Shanglang Yao (CTO of EOE), “Developers need detailed statistical data to gain an insight into his apps. Umeng is a great tool that provides such professional statistical analysis, informing the developers how their app are performing and pushing them to fix or improve their apps.”

Fan Jiang, the founder of Umeng, previously worked at Google China. According to Fan, the advantages of Umeng as compared with other similar analytics tools are two-fold. First, Umeng offers very deep and professional statistical analysis. Second, the statistical analysis is provided on the basis that the end user experience is enhanced instead of negatively impacted. “It takes us a lot of time to improve Umeng, reduce its upload data flow and minimize its influence on the original app so that the app user gets a better user experience. Good user experience is considered of great importance by app developers,” said Fan.

Fan said he realized that he prefers to be an entrepreneur to a worker after two years’ work at Google China. “I like to build something from scratch and work from the beginning through to the end. I don’t like to start from anywhere in-between.” With this in mind, Fan started to build his own team when Innovation Works was about to launch its’ “Acceleration project” for start-up teams. Fan has a clear idea about what Umeng should be like. “I am a mobile developer myself before. When developing Android apps, I realized that mobile apps are part of today’s internet. While there are a lot of tools that help developers of websites to learn about their products, i.e. websites, mobile developers cannot get information about product usage easily. I thus decided to develop a tool for mobile app developers. Umeng is our first attempt and the beta version of Umeng was released to public in May, 2010.”

Umeng’s team has got a lot of help from Innovation Works including funding, market development and recruitment just like other teams in the “Acceleration project”. “Especially in recruitment, we have earn a lot of recognition because of Kai-Fu Li and Innovation Works’ reputation’, says Fan, ‘We were therefore able to hire experienced teammates and enhance the team’s capability.” Fan also said, “Personally speaking, I have achieved a higher individual value in Innovation Works by gaining an overview of the industry. Because the projects Innovation Works funds cover almost every area of mobile internet, Innovation Works is able to provide you with a lot of information about how such projects make profit.”

Umeng is a non-profitable tool till now. Fan said he and his team believe that in the future, they can find a win-win solution between developers and them. It has been proved by internet (non-mobile) that there is a huge and profitable opportunity in providing services for developers.

Finally, Fan told the reporter that if everything goes well, Umeng will become a company running the Umeng project itself. In the future, Umeng will provide more services such as gathering users’ feedbacks and making statistical analysis of the feedbacks. There is no doubt that a few months later Umeng’s team will be facing a series of big challenges in fundraising, technology development, management and company operation. But with the help of Innovation Works, the risk they take will be sharply reduced.