Firefox OS/Metrics/App Usage

Links

• AppUsage
• Main Metrics Page

Requirements

For all system and 3rd party apps, track:

1. Total time that each app (by URL) has been actively been used (in the foreground while the screen is on)
2. Counts for the number of times an app has been opened, closed, or crashed
3. A list of apps that have been uninstalled since the last successful report

Design

The App Updates Metrics (AUM) service actively collects usage information by hooking into several system events. The determination of running time of an app looks something like this:

• When an app is opened, or the user switches to the homescreen, AUM marks it as the currently running app, and records the current time
• When the device is locked, the display goes to sleep, or another app is opened, AUM records the delta of the current time with the current app's start time
• When the device is unlocked after the display was sleeping, the current app's start time is reset to the current time so we don't record usage time while the screen was off/locked
• AUM also records installs, uninstalls, and and activity invocations (on activity URLs -- not running time) of apps

When the device is idle and and any of these registered events occur:

• AUM will save the currently collected metrics to async storage
• If the device is also online and a specified interval has passed (default 24 hours), AUM will begin attemping to transmit the stored metrics to the Telemetry server
• If transmission fails, then a separate retry interval (default 1 hour) controls how often AUM will retry transmission until it is successful

Example Payload and URL

POST https://fxos.telemetry.mozilla.org/submit/telemetry/metrics/FirefoxOS/appusage
{
    "apps": {
        "app://verticalhome.gaiamobile.org/manifest.webapp": {
            "activities": {},
            "installs": 0,
            "invocations": 1,
            "uninstalls": 0,
            "usageTime": 23
        }
    },
    "deviceID": "j2670k6q",
    "deviceinfo": {
        "developer.menu.enabled": true,
        "deviceinfo.platform_build_id": "20140902135234",
        "deviceinfo.platform_version": "34.0a1",
        "deviceinfo.update_channel": "unknown"
    },
    "locale": "en-US",
    "screen": {
        "devicePixelRatio": 1.5,
        "height": 569,
        "width": 320
    },
    "start": 1411567451826,
    "stop": 1411577295717
}

Glossary

apps	Usage for each app in this batch (these are not aggregates), keyed by the app's manifest URL installs The number of app installs uninstalls The number of app uninstalls invocations The number of times the app was started usageTime The total number of seconds the app was used
deviceID	A randomly generated deviceID to help server side de-duplication. This is separate from any other ID in the system, including the FTU activation ping
deviceinfo	developer.menu.enabled Whether or not this is a 'production' build deviceinfo.platform_build_id The timestamp that gecko was built deviceinfo.platform_version The version string of gecko deviceinfo.update_channel Update channel used for FxOS OTA updates
locale	Platform locale string, i.e. 'en-US'
screen	devicePixelRatio ratio of physical pixels to virtual pixels on the device width screen width in CSS pixels height screen height in CSS pixels
start	UNIX device timestamp of when this batch of metrics started recording
stop	UNIX device timestamp of when this batch of metrics stopped recording

Notes

• The size of the JSON payload that we send to the telemetry server seems to be between 1KB-3KB on average.

App usage metrics

See FirefoxOS/Metrics/App Usage