App creation and analytics made easy at AWS
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has introduced a host of new capabilities as part of its Mobile Service platform to simplify the development and management of apps.
According to AWS, its new Amazon Cognito service provides simple user identity and data synchronization that lets developers create apps that authenticate users through popular public login providers, and then keep app data such as user preferences and game state synced between devices. In addition, the Amazon Mobile Analytics service allows developers to easily collect and analyze app usage data, up to billions of events per day from millions of users, and delivers usage reports within an hour of data being sent by the app, according to the company.
AWS also introduced a new unified Mobile Software Development Kit (SDK) that makes it easy for iOS, Android, and Fire OS developers to access the new Amazon Cognito and Amazon Mobile Analytics services as well as popular AWS services like Amazon S3 and Amazon DynamoDB.
“We continue to hear from customers that they prefer to avoid having to build any of the undifferentiated parts of their mobile apps,” said Marco Argenti, vp of mobile at Amazon Web Services. “AWS already provides the backend processing, storage, and databases that customers around the world use to power sophisticated mobile apps. We designed AWS Mobile Services, including Amazon Cognito and AWS Mobile Analytics, to make it even simpler and more cost-effective to build and scale mobile apps on the AWS Cloud.”
With Amazon Cognito, Amazon Mobile Analytics, and the AWS Mobile SDK, developers are now able to focus more of their energy on what matters, the differentiated functionality of their app that attracts and retains end users, according to the company.
With AWS Mobile Services, developers are able to solve problems such as securely storing, managing and syncing user identities and data. Amazon notes that as more and more users utilize the same apps across various devices running different mobile platforms, developers often have to manage multiple user logins to securely store and retrieve data for their users, reconcile different versions of the data as devices go on and offline, and keep data in sync between devices. With Amazon Cognito, developers can incorporate these capabilities into their apps with just a few lines of code. Amazon Cognito lets developers build apps that allow users to start off as unauthenticated guests and then sign in with Amazon, Facebook, or Google. Amazon Cognito manages the complexity of keeping app data in sync on all devices associated with a user identity.
Amazon’s Mobile Analytics service provides basic details such as how many users an app has, how much revenue it’s generating, and what a user is doing to app developers. The service collects and visualizes mobile app usage data so that developers can understand user behavior and improve the customer experience for their apps. Amazon Mobile Analytics can collect and process billions of events per day from millions of users. It generates reports on active users, sessions, retention, in-application revenue, and custom events. Many mobile analytics solutions deliver usage data many hours after the usage happens. Amazon Mobile Analytics is designed to deliver usage reports within an hour of data being sent by the app so that developers can act on the data more quickly. All AWS customers can begin using Amazon Mobile Analytics at no charge and process up to 100 million events per month for free.