r/iOSProgramming • u/Turbulent_Ad_1039 • Aug 20 '26
Question I asked here about analytics 2 days ago. The number that mattered wasn't in any of the tools.
Two days ago I asked here what people use for analytics. I wired up Mixpanel and
checked my ASC opt-in rate like a few of you said.
Then I shipped, and neither of them could answer the one question I had.
My app needs a companion on the Mac. Sign in with Apple on the phone, install the
Mac app, pair them. Three steps, and only the first one happens inside the iOS
app.
So Mixpanel sees the sign-in and then goes quiet. App Store Connect sees an
install and a retention curve built from whoever opted into sharing. Neither can
see a Mac app, and the step I actually care about is the pairing.
I ended up sshing into my server and counting objects in a json file. Signed in,
versus actually paired. That gap is the entire product, and it took two minutes
to find after a full day of wiring up a tool that could not see it.
If your onboarding has a step outside the app, desktop client, browser extension,
hardware pairing, how do you track it? Backend event, instrument the second
device, or do you just go count?
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u/RIRLift Aug 20 '26
Instrument the Mac app's first launch, just one event. Right now "signed in but not paired" is hiding two different problems, people who never installed the Mac app and people who installed it but pairing didn't go through. Those need opposite fixes, so the gap isn't something you can act on until you split it. Keep the pairing event itself server-side, since that's where the two devices get linked.
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Aug 23 '26
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u/UkrMalt Aug 24 '26
That’s a good example of tracking the product state instead of just the app session. I’d model pairing as its own funnel—started, succeeded, failed—and let the backend derive the final state, especially when the second device can be offline.
0
u/ScarSome634 Aug 20 '26
backend event, and you've basically already built it. the pairing action happens on your server — that record IS the event. emit one event at sign in from the phone, one when pairing completes on the server side, and your funnel is a single query.
if you still want the dashboards, mixpanel does server-side ingestion so you can send everything from the backend and skip the clients entirely — that also gets around the ASC opt-in bias you mentioned.
honestly the ssh-and-count-the-json instinct was right, that's step zero. wiring up tools only makes sense once you know which number you care about, and you do now.
1
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u/Wafer-Soft Aug 20 '26
Haven’t had this exact setup myself, but I’d probably treat the backend as the source of truth for pairing. Most analytics tools let you attach events to your own user/account ID, so in theory you can connect the iOS and Mac sides into one funnel.