Why I replaced TelemetryDeck with my own analytics

Over the past year I’ve been using TelemetryDeck in my mobile apps. Mainly to get a general sense of how the apps are performing without having to constantly log into App Store.

Thanks to custom events I was also able to measure a few additional things. At the beginning everything worked flawlessly. The setup was trivial, and sending events was simple and intuitive. For a few months I didn’t have any major issues, but eventually things started to break. Which is a shame, because I was genuinely happy with the service, plus it’s an EU-based company, which was important to me.

Unfortunately, around November the data started showing up with significant delays. The longest I had to wait was a full week before new data appeared at all. Even App Store doesn’t have that kind of lag. On top of that there were gaps in reports, lost events, and large discrepancies between TelemetryDeck data, App Store numbers, and queries to my own API.

TelemetryDeck also offers email reports. You can choose how often they should be sent. I had mine set to monthly. I’ve probably seen it three times. The similarity to Apple here is striking. Supposedly they send it, but somehow it never arrives.

At some point I just had enough. Not only of this service, but of software in general lately. More and more often I find myself thinking it’s better to have my own tools and not rely on third-party solutions.

In my case, I ended up writing a simple service in Go. It meets my needs and replaced TelemetryDeck without any issues. If something breaks, I can fix it immediately and move on. And if I ever need something more advanced, I can just build on top of what I already have.

Some people might say I wasted time. I’d say at least I sleep better and don’t get frustrated anymore and that matters more to me.