Forage Analytics - Analytics for React Native - Interview with Steven Malone

Analytics is a big topic. What you don't know, you cannot optimize.

To learn more about it, I am interviewing Steven Malone about Forage Analytics, an analytics solution aimed for React Native.

Can you tell a bit about yourself?#

I am the Marketing Coordinator for Yozu & Forage Analytics. My background includes Computer Science & Digital Marketing. For the last three years, I have led all marketing activities within Yozu. It's the company that built Forage Analytics.

These activities range from paid advertising, SEO, content, social media, and include the biggest software event in Liverpool, UK. My biggest interests sit within lead generation through PPC and trying to outrank our competitors through organic traffic.

How would you describe Forage Analytics to someone who has never heard of it?#

Forage is a mobile analytics product built from the ground up for React Native. We give development teams powerful insight into all mobile app user interactions. Forage captures and stores data without limits and delivers responsive analysis, removing the constraints faced with other tools.

How does Forage Analytics work?#

Forage provides an SDK distributed through npm as this allows you to integrate the SDK into your application and begin learning session activities and behaviors about your users. Forage SDK allows you to send custom screen and data events of any size with no limit on the amount of information you can send us.

When the user minimizes your application, Forage SDK bundles all the collected information you have requested and sends it to our scalable AWS backend for instant access to your data on app.forage-analytics.com.

How does Forage Analytics differ from other solutions?#

Forage is the first purpose-built product made specifically for React Native. As a software company, our dev teams were constantly faced with project delays due to the limitations of other mobile analytics tools we used. With Forage, we now capture and store unlimited data without being obstructed by daily limitations to what we can process.

Why did you develop Forage Analytics?#

Forage was built after continuous frustration with the current market offerings. Using the industry's leading mobile application analytics tools, our developers faced daily limitations to the amount of data we could capture and store. The mobile analytics market lacked a limitless and intuitive solution offering all of the most important features the big players do for a fraction of the cost.

What next?#

We aim to make Forage a market leader within the mobile analytics space, continually taking on user feedback and testing new ways to help our end users.

What does the future look like for Forage Analytics and mobile development in general? Can you see any particular trends?#

We have been listening to our users and are currently working on a technical overview screen of all your devices broken down in an easy-to-use dashboard. Another exciting feature that's coming up is called user funnels. The feature will allow Product Owners / Project Managers to define their flows within their application and track the user dropout rate over any period specified.

What advice would you give to programmers getting into mobile development?#

Find out where you learn best and learn as much as possible

There are many ways to learn – videos, books, audiobooks, and podcasts to name a few. Discover your preference and own it.

Embrace a struggle to solve a problem, but not too much

Struggling to solve a problem is natural. Embrace the frustration often as it only makes finding the solution only that sweeter. However, at a certain point, you should seek help from another person or a resource.

Learn as much from others as possible

Two heads are better than one. If the primary developer encounters a problem, there will be two of you to solve the issue. You'll make fewer mistakes, and it's an effective way to share knowledge.

Pass your knowledge on. Teach others what you learn

The software development community is collaborative, and it strives to help one another. There will be many communities online you can participate in to help others, and we'd urge you to join one. Teaching others what you know enables you to further your knowledge of that subject.

Volunteer to hold a talk about a topic that piques your interest as it will force you to research the areas you never thought about to ensure you know the topic front and back. You'll be sharing your knowledge while furthering your understanding.

Who should I interview next?#

We would recommend interviewing Shrey Vijayvargiya. He's a lovely guy who has recently just received a demo from us at Forage. Shrey is a Developer by profession with two years of experience and is a designer by interest.

Conclusion#

Thanks for the interview, Steven! I hope you'll push the solution forward as analytics is a growing space that has the potential to make software development more data-driven.

You can see the solution in action below, and you can find Forage online in case you want to try it out in your React Native app.