Google Releases Android Play Developer Reporting API
Written by Kay Ewbank
Friday, 18 March 2022
Google has released the Google Play Developer Reporting API, providing programmatic access to app-level data and metrics for internal reporting, analysis and automation.
The API is designed to be used alongside the Android Vitals Overview in Play Console, which lets developers check how well their app or game is running. The API has been developed in response to requests from developers who want to work with their vitals data outside Play Console.
The Play Developer Reporting API provides just this. The version available now provides access to the main core Android vitals stability and battery metrics: crash rate, ANR rate, excessive wake-up rate, and stuck background wake-lock rate. It also provides stack traces. The API can also be used to view anomalies, breakdowns (including new country filters in Vitals), and three years of metric history.
The Android team says that once you've enabled the API, it might be a good idea to try sending some requests manually to get a sense of the API resources and operation "before implementing more complex solutions". They say this can also help you establish query times, which will vary depending on the amount of data being processed. Queries over long time ranges, across many dimensions, and/or against very large apps will take longer to execute.
The team points out that most of the available metric sets are only refreshed once a day, so you ought to check that new data is actually available before sending a query to avoid wasting resources and request quota.
They say that care should be taken when requesting timelines to request date ranges, so that the size of the time range is inversely proportional to the size of your app and the number of breakdowns. For example, a large app should select fewer days in a single query request to avoid query timeouts caused by reading too much data
The Android Play Developer Reporting API is available for download now.
Israeli mathematician and computer scientist, Avi Wigderson, is the recipient of the 2023 ACM A.M Turing Award which carries a $1 million prize with financial support from Google.
