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I need to do a study of what apps are actually used among a group of test users taking part of an experiment. I would like to know the time each of the random 3rd party apps have been used to do statistics on it. If possible, I plan on distributing an iOS app through TestFlight. My app will gather the app usage statistics and send it to my server.

The overall goal is to get total usage time for each installed app on a daily base from each of the users taking part of the experiment.

What I have: One of my ideas are to develop an app that will use the VoIP backgrounding profile (or similar) to run in the background and periodically (like every 10 secs) log the name or bundle identifier of the current foreground app (if any).

I have found a method to get the current running processes: Can we retrieve the applications currently running in iPhone and iPad The method described in the above post gives a struct kinfo_proc that includes other structs with information such the process name, priority and running time (including time spent in the background). I have not been able to identify a flag revealing what process is in the foreground. Also the priority does not seem to be a reliable indictor. Something I'm missing here?

The above method can be used to get the current running time for a process, but as each app can be sleeping in the background for days (or weeks) this is a poor indicator for how much the app has actually been used. If I could kill all the running user installed apps every hour or so I could get an indicator of how often apps are used. The most used apps would be cold-started by the user more often. But that would give an unpleasant experience for the testers as apps are killed randomly. But anyway, is there a way I can kill another process?

Another idea is to traverse through the view hierarchy to probe the label of the leftmost app in the task bar. Any ideas of how this might be possible to hack?

I had another idea of analyzing device logs and gathering app usage statistics that way. However it seems that app background-foreground switching activity is not logged to the system console. Is there some other logs containing this information or can I get it somehow by enabling energy diagnostics logging?

If I had my test users set up to use Apple Mobile Device Management (MDM) would I then be able to collect the information I am interested in?

Any ideas are very much appreciated.

A few notes: My test users does not have jailbroken devices, but I can use private APIs as I am not distributing through the App Store.

Community
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olegam
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  • So I found this question that basically answers my question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8252396/how-to-determine-which-apps-are-background-and-which-app-is-foreground-on-ios-by – olegam Feb 22 '13 at 21:54

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I would use an analytics tool like Flurry Analytics to get the data concerning usage statistics, which you could then download into your app using their API. They can get you very details stats on how your users are using your app, how frequently, etc. It's a great tool, plus it's free!

sashimiblade
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  • I am not looking for analytics on how users use my app. But for specific usage data of all other apps the test user has installed. So Flurry and other analytics platforms are not options as they solve a different problem. – olegam Feb 22 '13 at 20:55
  • If I understand the problem correctly, couldn't you just install Flurry on all of your test apps and analyze the usage of each app relative to the other apps? – sashimiblade Feb 23 '13 at 03:13
  • I don't make the test apps. They are all the apps the user may install from the app store. – olegam Feb 23 '13 at 09:12