Is the mobile tag management useless for app analytics?

[Uwe_Moeller-Goebel]

Hi,

I was always puzzled by the way the mobile tracking is set up and wanted to verify this once and for all. 

Implmenting tracking in the app is straight forward with adobe .trackState for a page views and .action for events. Fair enough. However, everything is implemented in the code and I have no control over what is send to Adobe, unless I brief a developer to take something out of the app code.

This is strange to me as the Adobe SDK contains a Launch container which is used to host the Analytics extension. You can setup Analytics tags but they are triggered by .trackState and .trackAction which send the data to Analytics anyway. So what is the point of creating Adobe Analytics tags in mobile tag manager? Ideally the tag manager would work like for the website and give me the capability to fetch structured data and decide what to send to Analytics, but it doesn't seem to be possible to do this?

Best regards

Uwe

[Harveer_SinghGi1]

Hi @Uwe_Moeller-Goebel ,

I understand why you'd expect an app implementation through Adobe Launch to behave the same way as it does for web but that is not possible as the Launch/Tags library for web runs inside the page’s JavaScript context. It can observe the DOM, attach listeners, and trigger rules on clicks, views, timers, data layer changes, etc. which helps in injecting behavior at runtime. However, in mobile apps there is no DOM to observe and no generic UI event bus the SDK can hook into and app stores also restrict downloading and executing new native code that would alter app behavior dynamically. Due to these restrictions the app implementations differ from web implementation done in Adobe Launch.

Adobe Launch in apps can listen to SDK events (Lifecycle, Places, Messaging, Push, etc.) and to app-dispatched events which can be used to attach/modify data on those events or trigger new events.

Cheers!