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The facts:

  1. My company has developed an Android app.
  2. My company has NOT developed an iOS version to this app in anyway.
  3. I have created a Google Analytics account, opened a mobile app tracking ID, and connected it to my Android app using the SDK (this was not done by me, rather by our developer).
  4. Our app launched and has some users according to both our Google Analytic's account and the Google Play Developer Console account.

In the Google Analytics if I examine the operating systems of my users my operaiting split is:

  • Android - 91.69%
  • Macintosh - 8.05% (Macintosh 10.10)
  • iOS - 0.26% (iOS 8.1.2)

How is this possible? We haven't developed for iOS.

Meir.r
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    android emulator on a mac? :justguessing: – Nanne Mar 18 '15 at 14:58
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    Network proxy rewrites on the user agent? If you can get the geo location for these Mac/iOS users - it might help narrow it down. – Morrison Chang Mar 18 '15 at 15:02
  • Nanne - I'm not sure how to very that. Morrison - I'm not sure how to check that. Do you know? I am seeing a number of users with - (not set) as their geo location. Is this related in your eyes? – Meir.r Mar 18 '15 at 15:09
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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it's not a programming question, but rather relates to a third-party tool. – 323go Mar 18 '15 at 15:20
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    I'm having the same thing, since yesterday we suddenly have 68 new users on our app as Macintosh... coming from "auranext sa", "013 netvision ltd" and "alvotech gmbh"... weird... – Gavin Hellyer Mar 19 '15 at 09:17

1 Answers1

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This is so-called referral spam. I won't go into details here as there're lots of good sources on the net about the issue(e.g. this, this and this one).
I've handled this issue like this:

  1. Go to your app view in the Google Analytics.
  2. Open the 'Admin' tab.
  3. Click on 'View settings'.
  4. There will be section called 'Bot Filtering', check the 'Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders' option.

From now on Google will remove the spam hits from their analytics. This solution has two issues, though:

  1. Historical data will not be affected by this option, i.e. spam hits which were made in the past will remain in your data, Google will only filter your future hits.
  2. Google promises to remove hits from known bots, which means that the time from the new bot appearance to the moment when it will be included in the Google filter list can be indefinitely long. I use this solution for the last week though and didn't find any new bots breaking through the filter.
aga
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  • Thanks! I've been struggling mightily with this. Much appreciated. – Meir.r May 12 '15 at 11:36
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    @user3221877 if you find my answer useful you can mark it as accepted (just click the tick button). :) – aga May 12 '15 at 13:04
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    1. filtering by country is impractical for an android app unless you want to exclude all the users in a country 2. filtering to only include valid hostnames doesn't work for an android app because valid android traffic doesn't have a hostname 3. Most of the available information isn't relevant for Android app analytics. – Rich Ehmer Aug 15 '15 at 17:43