What mobile SDKs every product manager or developer should use

What mobile SDKs should every Product Manager or Developer use for their apps? Whether you’re trying to track user behavior or monetize your mobile app, choosing the right SDK partner is critical to your success.

Kara Dake, Product Evangelist for CleverTap recently answered the following question on her Quora Channel.

Are Mobile Developer using SDKs in their apps? There are many SDK’s that enhance mobile app functionalities. Which ones are you using? Do you prefer to use SDK or write your own code?

Here is a list of SDKs that I often see installed in our customer’s apps, listed by category:

Analytics + User Engagement

CleverTap is a mobile analytics + engagement SDK with rich user insights, powerful segmentation and personalized messaging. Our analytics features include funnels, retention cohorts, trends, event tracking, uninstall tracking, and rich user profiles.

On the engagement side, we offer push notifications, in-app notifications, web notifications, Facebook re-marketing, email marketing, and 6 pre-built ‘Clever Campaign’ templates.

Our developer-ready platform puts you in control of your data. With our server APIs, you can import data profiles or events from any source, or export data for external analysis to your CRM, or BI. You can also programmatically schedule and manage your campaigns. Our Client API’s allow for programmatic access to all the user profile and activity data.

CleverTap integrates with many key services, including install attribution tracking, ad networks, email, and SMS.

Our SDK takes 10 minutes to integrate, and CleverTap has the lowest pricing in the industry. Sign up here to view the dashboard for free and try it yourself!

Attribution

These are SDKs that allow developers and marketers to attribute each installation to a particular source. This is an essential tool within an app to determine the efficiency of each source or channel. These three popular attribution SDKs also integrate with CleverTap, so you can measure and track your traffic all the way through the retention funnel.

• AppsFlyer follows impressions, installations and initial launches from different channels. It is a simple SDK to integrate, and all popular ad-networks are linked.
• Kochava provides attribution SDKs for Android and iOS, and also for Windows, Kindle and Blackberry. It offers a non-SDK solution using server to server calls in case developers are cautious of using external SDKs.
• Adjust is a business intelligence platform which combines attribution for advertising sources with advanced in-app analytics and store statistics.

Deep linking

Branch unifies mobile experiences between native apps and marketing channels. Using Branch’s deep links, you can convert mobile traffic in to engaged app users by driving your users directly in to the pages where you want them to engage and convert. CleverTap also integrates with Branch to track retention metrics from your marketing channels.

A/B Testing

Optimizely is a tool that also has a mobile SDK for A/B testing. Test onboarding, permissions, feature discovery, re-engagement and phased rollouts.

Crash reporting

Crashlytics is a widely used crash reporting solution.

Monetization

• Adcolony has under its umbrella many satisfied world class brands and advertisers. They have reached their target audiences, and have made them stay, engaged and therefore monetized; and, coupled with InstaPlay, audiences remain because they know that there is no need to wait for video ads to load.
• Airpush – A member of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, Airpush has over 120,000 live apps that utilize it’s SDK.
• BrightRoll has its own big merits. ComScore sees BrightRoll as the leading video ad property in the United States when it comes to reaching the most unique viewers. It has a real time video marketplace, thus it maximizes monetization of inventories, and it also powers numerous video apps for consumers to allow them to connect to digital traffic all over the web.