Every day, app developers around the world are creating new apps to help you monitor your health, learn something new, communicate with your loved ones, or manage your connected appliances at home. As large parts of our lives shifted online, so has our personal data.
To keep improving their apps over time, companies often use and analyse that data to learn how users interact with the app, and that’s great. What isn’t great is when some data analytics tools become too intrusive and track our every action, possibly even monetizing this information through data brokers. App makers who care about privacy need an analytics tool that was built to maximize user privacy. That’s where TelemetryDeck comes in.
Daniel Jilg, the co-founder of TelemetryDeck, has built apps since the launch of the Apple App Store in 2008 and has more than 12 years of experience building server-based applications. User privacy is one of the guiding principles for all of his projects. To Daniel, “it feels wrong to take your users’ data and just pawn it off to a third party”. Even collecting that data about individual users doesn’t seem right to him. “Unless we’re making a navigation app, we don’t really need a user’s exact location, for example, and it would be downright creepy to collect it,” Daniel says. With this in mind, he wrote the first line of code of TelemetryDeck in September 2020.
Daniel was soon joined by Lisa Figas, who is a marketing specialist and passionate about privacy and policy, amongst other things. She helps to drive the business forward by finding new partners and doing many of the daily tasks it takes to run a start-up. As entrepreneurs, Daniel and Lisa also strive to build an open and diverse workplace, where people with all kinds of experiences and backgrounds can thrive.
TelemetryDeck allows developers to improve their products by providing immediate, accurate, and completely anonymised analytics data on how customers use their apps. With TelemetryDeck a developer can learn about usage patterns, flows, and configuration, without putting their users’ privacy at risk. The TelemetryDeck platform is a useful tool for app developers who want to avoid data-hungry analytics tools but still want to improve their services. By focusing on privacy, TelemetryDeck aims to provide a service that is easy to use for small developers, while also triggering the interest of larger developers. Once developers have the right metrics, they can see where improvements to their app may be necessary. For example, these metrics can provide app developers with insights on whether a user is seeing a brand-new feature or a payment screen that was just introduced and make adjustments accordingly.
Courtesy TelemetryDeck
The platform also helps developers navigate through legislation like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) or the European General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR), and commercial companies’ user privacy policies such as Apple’s App Tracking Transparency framework. These policies make unnecessary data collection less practical, and navigating such policies successfully is crucial for small app companies. The TelemetryDeck team wants to help businesses create privacy-focused ecosystems because they believe that these strong privacy protections can be good for businesses.
In today’s data-driven economy, solutions like TelemetryDeck have become increasingly important to retain users’ trust in the app ecosystem. Trust has been an essential factor in the growth of the app economy and creates a virtuous cycle. App users have peace of mind knowing that their data is not being shared with third parties. Users, therefore, feel more at ease increasing their engagement with apps, all while app developers benefit from getting just the right information they need to improve, enhance, and boost their product and user experience.
TelemetryDeck is currently available in beta on the TelemetryDeck website. Once officially launched, the platform will remain free to use for small app developers and will offer different price ranges for medium and larger app companies. If you want to learn more about their solutions, you can visit their website here.