Note: This series is just the technology enablement; I plan to cover the strategy as interest in this blog grows, including the why and the when of using these things.
After you pull the most recent version of the app (or any app with Firebase already), we just need to add one more podfile. You should know the drill by now. 😁
While you wait for me to build (yet another) post on iOS SDKs, I would head over to Jan’s blog and see his very thorough walkthrough of the Android side of the house.
Quickly: Crashlytics helps manage crashes and issues with builds in a pretty UI, and while some of this functionality exists in GA, this is considered the main crash reporting tool for Firebase.
One quick thing you’ll want to enable while developing is the DebugView in Google Analytics. It is a live-ish stream of events from the device, and very useful to begin to understand how your application is understood by GA.
DebugView
Head over to the docs for a thorough understanding, or just follow along here.
To enable it, you’ll need to pass this argument in XCode:
Cheat Sheet: This post’s updated sample app if you like (plus your own GoogleService-Info.plist file)
Let’s start off by making sure we have a new Google Analytics property since it takes a bit for the data to show up when making a new property (maybe I’m just impatient). Then head on over to https://console.firebase.google.com/ and create a new project.
I have decided to take on a fun learning experience and build a sample iOS app that I can use to integrate Adobe, Google, Facebook, etc. martech SDKs and share the learnings here.
I’m not a developer, I’m a strategist, but I’ve trudged through and learned how to do the basics, so for this project I’m going to assume you know at least the very basics of Swift programming, why we want a martech SDK in our app, how to build and run an app in XCode, etc.
Starting with the sample app, I built a very simple three-tabbed Swift app you can download and follow along with.
The basic information architecture of my sample app.
You will observe that I have three tabs, Account, Shop, and Support. I picked these because we can demo some of the functionality of the SDKs across these three basic view paradigms.
Go ahead and click through the views. Nothing exciting here, and you should see a whole lotta nothing happening in the logs in XCode.
The main thing I’d like to call out is that I added a viewDidLoad, and a viewWillAppear. My thoughts on why I did this relate to the functionality sending “pageviews” in the future Adobe Analytics implementation. Thoughts on this approach? Overkill, maybe?
