Analytics-Swift for iOS & Apple

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Flagship libraries offer the most up-to-date functionality on Segment’s most popular platforms. Segment actively maintains flagship libraries, which benefit from new feature releases and ongoing development and support.


With Analytics-Swift, you can send data from iOS, tvOS, iPadOS, WatchOS, macOS and Linux applications to any analytics or marketing tool without having to learn, test, or implement a new API every time. Analytics-Swift is compatible with both Swift and Objective-C applications.

If you’re migrating to Analytics-Swift from Analytics iOS (Classic), you can skip to the migration guide.

Benefits of Analytics-Swift

Analytics-Swift provides several key benefits including improvements in stability, performance, and developer experience when compared to Analytics iOS (Classic).

Performance

Analytics-Swift offers improved performance when compared to Analytics iOS. For a more detailed overview, you can reference the blog post.

  • Faster event processing and delivery
  • Significantly lower CPU usage
  • Small memory & disk usage footprint

Developer Experience

Analytics-Swift adds several improvements to the overall experience of using the core SDK, as well as improvements to the overall Plugin Architecture.

  • Ability to use Type Safe data structures rather than just dictionaries.
  • Simpler syntax and more developer friendly overall.
  • More customization options than ever before.

Device Mode Transformations & Filtering

For the first time ever, developers can filter and transform their users’ events even before the events leave the mobile device. What’s more, these Filters & transformations can be applied dynamically (either through the Segment Dashboard, or Javascript uploaded to the workspace) and do not require any app updates.

Learn more about Destination Filters on Mobile, and Edge Functions on Mobile.

Getting started

Multiple Instances

Multiple Instances are supported as part of the Analytics-Swift mobile library. However, each instance must have a unique writeKey defined, or malformed JSON may be sent to our API resulting in 400 errors.

To get started with the Analytics-Swift mobile library:

  1. Create a Source in Segment.
    1. Go to Connections > Sources > Add Source.
    2. Search for Apple and click Add source.
  2. Add the Analytics dependency to your application. Add the Swift package, git@github.com:segmentio/analytics-swift.git as a dependency through either of these 2 options:
    1. Your package.swift file
    2. Xcode
      1. Xcode 12: File > Swift Packages > Add Package Dependency
      2. Xcode 13: File > Add Packages…

    After installing the package, you can reference Analytics-Swift by importing Segment’s Analytics package with import Segment.

  3. Initialize and configure the Analytics-Swift client. For example, in a lifecycle method such as didFinishLaunchingWithOptions in iOS:
    var analytics: Analytics? = nil

    func application(_ application: UIApplication, didFinishLaunchingWithOptions launchOptions: [UIApplication.LaunchOptionsKey: Any]?) -> Bool {
            // Override point for customization after application launch.
            let configuration = Configuration(writeKey: "WRITE_KEY")
                .trackApplicationLifecycleEvents(true)
                .flushInterval(10)

            analytics = Analytics(configuration: configuration)
    }
  @import Segment;
  ...

  - (BOOL)application:(UIApplication *)application didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:(NSDictionary *)launchOptions {
      // Override point for customization after application launch.
      SEGConfiguration *config = [[SEGConfiguration alloc] initWithWriteKey:@"WRITE_KEY"];
      config.trackApplicationLifecycleEvents = YES;
    
      _analytics = [[SEGAnalytics alloc] initWithConfiguration: config];    

      [self.analytics track:@"Example Event"];
      [self.analytics track:@"Example Properties" properties:@{@"email": @"sloth@segment.com"}];
    
      return YES;
  }

These are the options you can apply to configure the client:

Option Name Description
writeKey required This is your Segment write key.
apiHost The default is set to api.segment.io/v1.
This sets a default API Host to which Segment sends event.
autoAddSegmentDestination The default is set to true.
This automatically adds the Segment Destination plugin. Set to false if you want to add plugins to the Segment Destination.
cdnHost The default is set to cdn-settings.segment.com/v1.
This sets a default CDN Host from which Segment retrieves settings.
defaultSettings The default is set to {}.
This is the settings object used as fallback in case of network failure.
flushAt The default is set to 20.
The count of events at which Segment flushes events.
flushInterval The default is set to 30 (seconds).
The interval in seconds at which Segment flushes events.
trackApplicationLifecycleEvents The default is set to true.
This automatically tracks lifecycle events. Set to false to stop tracking lifecycle events.

AppClip Tracking

If you are tracking App Clips using iOS or Swift libraries, you may encounter zeros in your device ID. Segment recommends that you set your own device ID in these instances to avoid this issue.

Core tracking methods

Once you’ve installed the Analytics-Swift library, you can start collecting data through Segment’s tracking methods:

Destinations

Destinations are the business tools or apps that Segment forwards your data to. Adding Destinations allow you to act on your data and learn more about your customers in real time.

See Segment’s documentation for device-mode destinations for a full list of supported device-mode plugins.

See Segment’s cloud-mode destinations for a full list of available cloud-mode destinations that Swift supports.


Segment offers support for two different types of destination connection modes: Cloud-mode and Device-mode. learn more about the differences between the two in the Segment Destination docs.

Tools and extensions

Analytics-Swift is built with extensibility in mind. Use the tools list below to improve data collection.

Proxying events

If you proxy your events through the apiHost config option, you must forward the batched events to https://api.segment.io/v1/b. The https://api.segment.io/v1/batch endpoint is reserved for events arriving from server-side sending, and proxying to that endpoint for your mobile events may result in unexpected behavior.

If you are using the Analytics iOS (Classic) SDK, you can find the documentation here. Many of the features available in the Analytics-Swift SDK are not available in the Analytics iOS (Classic) SDK.

Timestamps in Swift

Due to efficiency updates made to Segment’s Swift library, Segment now adds the sentAt timestamp to an event when the batch is complete and initially tried to the Segment API. This can impact the value of the timestamp field calculated by Segment if users are operating in an offline mode. More details on this change can be seen in Segment’s timestamp documentation.

This page was last modified: 13 Aug 2024



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