Engineering
Getting Started with Countly’s Desktop SDK Integrations
Last updateD on
October 16, 2024
In an era dominated by mobile apps, desktop applications remain vital across numerous industries. From gaming to enterprise solutions, tracking desktop app performance, user behavior, and feedback is crucial. While mobile tracking is a well-established practice, companies also need to pay more attention to the importance of desktop tracking.
Despite the importance of desktop applications, many analytics platforms remain heavily focused on mobile tracking. This focus leaves desktop developers with limited options for flexible and comprehensive SDKs.
Countly's suite of desktop SDKs changes the game, enabling developers to track, analyze, and improve their desktop applications seamlessly. Whether you're developing a game or a corporate enterprise solution, Countly empowers you with the tools to enhance your desktop apps as effectively as mobile ones.
On the technical side, desktop applications require specialized tools to capture a wide range of data, from system-level performance metrics to user interactions across diverse environments. We design Countly's desktop SDKs with these unique challenges in mind. Unlike mobile SDKs, desktop SDKs must support various operating systems, development frameworks, and application architectures. These requirements include handling backend operations and asynchronous processes and ensuring minimal impact on application performance.
Countly's desktop SDKs allow developers to track data in complex environments, offering seamless integration with different programming languages and frameworks, from Java to Unity, C++, and .NET. With support for custom event tracking, performance monitoring, and user feedback widgets, Countly gives developers complete control over how they gather and utilize their application data.
Countly’s desktop SDKs are designed with privacy and ownership at the core. Unlike many analytics platforms that rely on third-party servers to store and process data, Countly takes a customer-first approach. All data collected through Countly’s desktop SDKs is stored on servers that are fully owned and operated by the customer, ensuring complete control over the data lifecycle. This means there is no data sharing with external parties, reducing the risk of data breaches, third-party access, or unauthorized data usage. By keeping everything in-house, customers can trust that their sensitive information stays secure, helping them maintain compliance with even the strictest data privacy regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and PDPL.
Countly SDKs offer a specialized mode for transferring data to your Countly server. In this mode, we turn off the regular API functionality and provide an alternative interface for recording user data. This setup is instrumental in backend environments or importing data from external sources into Countly. Data recorded in the Backend Mode is held in memory queues, meaning it is not stored persistently. This ensures minimal disk usage and fast operation. It also means that unsent data won't be saved if the application is closed or unexpectedly terminated before the transmission to the server is complete.
Backend Mode offers more than recording an event. Recording Crashes, Views, User Profile information, and Sessions is available within the Backend Mode. Enabling the Backend Mode is also reasonably straightforward. All it requires is to call the EnableBackendMode function on the configuration object. Countly offers the Backend Mode in the C#/Windows SDK and the Java SDK to use in the Backend environments.
The Java SDK and macOS SDK offer one of Countly’s most powerful features—Feedback Widgets. These widgets enable you to collect valuable user feedback through multiple formats, such as NPS (Net Promoter Score), Ratings, and Surveys, allowing developers to gather in-depth insights into user satisfaction and experiences.
Whether you need to assess customer loyalty through NPS, collect direct app ratings, or create custom surveys to target specific feedback, Countly makes it easy to configure and deploy these widgets across your desktop applications. The Feedback Widgets are straightforward to implement and integrate into your application, ensuring that you can start collecting user data quickly without complex configurations.
Countly's Unity SDK is explicitly tailored for game developers, providing tools to track player behavior, performance, and engagement. With its seamless integration into the Unity development environment, developers can quickly implement tracking for in-game actions, user feedback, and overall game performance. This allows studios to gain insights into player interactions, optimize gameplay mechanics, and improve user experience.
Adding Unity SDK into the project is basic enough for everyone. All that is required is to download the Unity Package from the GitHub release and import it into the project. After that, you are ready to go. Integration into the project is also as basic as adding the SDK part. After initializing, Unity SDK is ready to use with full power. You can record events, sessions, crash data, and much more. Unity SDK supports desktop build targets Windows, Linux, and MacOSX.
Countly stands out with its extensive support for various operating systems and a wide array of SDKs, making it a versatile choice for desktop application developers. Whether you target Windows, MacOS, or Linux, Countly provides SDKs catering to different environments and frameworks.
Developers can choose from a comprehensive range of SDKs, including Java, .NET/C#, C++, NodeJS (for Electron), Unity, and MacOS SDKs. The Unity SDK and C++ SDK support build targets for desktops, including Linux, Mac, and Windows. This flexibility allows you to integrate Countly into diverse application types—traditional desktop software, hybrid applications, or high-performance games. With such a broad spectrum of options, Countly ensures that developers can effectively track user interactions and performance metrics across multiple platforms, optimizing their applications for various user environments.
As the biggest difference from the other solutions you can find, Countly isn’t just about mobile tracking; it’s a comprehensive solution that covers both mobile and desktop applications. From gaming to enterprise-level apps, Countly’s desktop SDKs offer unmatched flexibility, integration options, and features. Whether you’re a game developer or managing corporate apps, Countly ensures that you have all the tools you need to enhance and improve your desktop applications effectively.
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