Snowplow mobile trackers version 4 with support for hybrid apps and anonymous tracking

We are pleased to announce the release of our mobile trackers: Snowplow iOS Tracker and Android Tracker version 4.0. The headlining features of this release are the support for hybrid mobile apps and anonymous tracking. These features were requested by the Snowplow community and we are excited to bring them to the mobile trackers!

The release brings various other improvements both in the tracker as well as the documentation. Read on to learn about:

1. Hybrid mobile apps
2. Anonymous tracking
3. Other tracker improvements
4. New documentation

Hybrid mobile apps

Hybrid apps are mobile apps that in addition to a native interface, provide part of the UI through an embedded Web view. The challenge is that Snowplow events often need to be tracked both from the native code as well as the Web view app. This could previously be supported by using the iOS or Android trackers in the native code and the JavaScript tracker in the Web view app. However, the tracked events had inconsistent session and platform information as each were tracked from a different app.

The new Snowplow WebView tracker is a library that can be installed in Web apps used in embedded Web views. It can communicate with the iOS and Android trackers and pass any tracked events to them. In turn, the iOS and Android trackers can track the events as if they originated in the native code with the same session and platform context entities as other events. The following diagram illustrates the interaction of the WebView and iOS/Android trackers in a hybrid app.

In order to set up the communication between the WebView and native trackers, one has to subscribe the native trackers to messages from the Web view: Snowplow.subscribeToWebViewEvents(webView). Subsequently, it will be possible to track events from the Web view app using the WebView tracker API. To learn more about setting up tracking in a hybrid app, follow the accelerator guide here.

Anonymous tracking

Anonymous tracking is a tracker feature that enables anonymising various user and session identifiers to support user privacy in case consent for tracking the identifiers is not given. The feature has been available for some time in the JavaScript tracker. This release brings equivalent functionality to the mobile trackers.

The affected user and session identifiers are stored in two context entities: Session and Platform context. Concretely, the following user and session identifiers can be anonymised:

1. Client-side user identifiers: the userId in Session context entity and the IDFA identifiers (appleIdfa, and appleIdfv) in the Platform context entity.
2. Client-side session identifiers: sessionId in Session context.
3. Server-side user identifiers: network_userid and user_ipaddress event properties.

There are several levels to the anonymisation depending on which of the three categories are affected:

1. Full client-side anonymisation

In this case, we want to anonymise both the client-side user identifiers as well as the client-side session identifiers. This means disabling the Session context altogether and enabling user anonymisation:

let config =TrackerConfiguration()
    .sessionContext(false) // Session context entity won't be added to events
    .userAnonymisation(true) // User identifiers in Platform context (IDFA and IDFV) will be anonymised

2. Client-side anonymisation with session tracking

This setting disables client-side user identifiers are but tracks session information. In practice, this means that events track the Session context entity but the userId property is a null UUID. In case Platform context is enabled, the IDFA identifiers will not be present.

let config =TrackerConfiguration()
    .sessionContext(true) // Session context is tracked with the session ID
    .userAnonymisation(true) // User identifiers in Session and Platform context are anonymised

3. Server-side anonymisation

Server-side anonymisation affects user identifiers set server-side. In particular, these are the network_userid property set in server-side cookie and the user IP address. You can anonymise the properties using the serverAnonymisation flag in EmitterConfiguration:

let config =EmitterConfiguration()
    .serverAnonymisation(true)

Setting the flag will add a SP-Anonymous HTTP header to requests sent to the Snowplow collector. The Snowplow pipeline will take care of anonymising the identifiers.

You can find more information about anonymous tracking in the mobile tracker documentation.

Other tracker improvements

There are several other noteworthy changes in this release. Concretely, the remote configuration now supports switching between multiple endpoints. This lets you have multiple sources of remote configuration and switch between them in your app. Additionally, it gives feedback of where the configuration was retrieved from. You can set a callback function that is now passed this information using the ConfigurationState enum that can indicate whether the configuration was read from cache, using default values or fetched from the remote endpoint over network. Learn more about remote configuration here.

Another welcome feature is that the the tracker.track(event) function now returns the tracked event ID. Having the event identifier can help referencing the tracked events in other data.

Finally, thanks to an external contribution from @onato, the iOS tracker can now be utilized in share extensions of iOS apps.

New documentation

We are very excited to announce major improvements to the documentation that now gives more guidance on how to make use of all the tracker features! We hope that this will improve the developer experience of instrumenting tracking in mobile apps.

For help integrating the tracker please have a look at the setup guide. If you have any questions or run into any problems, please visit our Discourse forum. Please raise any bugs in the iOS Tracker’s issues or Android Tracker’s issues on GitHub.