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Anyone heard of TinyMetrix?

CNEMCSE

Anyone else heard of this guy? Just got an email solicitation from tinymetrix.com 

Seems suspicious as *** to me: 

Supposedly it's an app class extension that tracks installs, crashes and user events in realtime

Adding a closed source barrel to my project for user tracking? Not likely!

  • in reply to mappicus

    Good idea. The developer should have figured to do that themselves. (So, it’s odd they didn’t.) Recruiting people that way might not seem as spammy (but maybe they were worried about upsetting Garmin).

    It looks legit (but I don’t make enough to consider it).

  • I heard of TinyMetrix already back in January when the author filed a PR in awesome-garmin. I thought it was a bit suspicious as well so asked a few questions and got some response. However, I've been waiting for anyone to pick this up or for the author to promote this better - not the least here on the forum - but nothing?

    I don't think there's anything malicious to this, I just didn't get the approach to spread or market it.

    flocsy🤠 said:
    One thing about barrels: there's no such thing as closed source. You see all the source code in the barrel, so that's ok.

    I actually didn't know this and just found out when testing TinyMetrix so I also had a quick look at  some of the source code and nothing weird what I could see.  I guess the way to monetize would basically be hosting and serving metrics in a good way.

    I never got around to test it other than in the sim but there it was only working sporadically and when switching device it just replaced the first metric with the second one - I guess the sim uses the same identifier and overwrite the data.

    My impression was that it was supposed to get around the fact that Garmin now hides exact numbers from us whereas with these metrics we would literally get all the watches out there ever starting/using the app/watch face. Those of you who actually tested this and got some real numbers for downloads, did you also publish a version with this to the IQ Store? Or how else would the backfilling work?

  • Hey,
    Dev behind Tinymetrix. Saw the thread and most of the concerns are fair so I wanted to reply myself instead of letting it sit.

    Quick context first: Connect IQ devs don't have a real analytics option. Android has Firebase, iOS has App Store Connect plus a dozen third-party tools. I wanted to build the thing I wished existed when I was running my own apps. it is working for me so the next step was tp productivize and share it with a few devs and get insights. I don't like to put a pricing at begining but the backend don't scale well in terms of cost.

    The outreach was informal in the worst sense. I scraped the public store pages of the top ~100 devs (based on app popularity) and mailed them individually. The download counts I quoted were just the sums of the numbers Garmin shows on those pages, which apparently aren't historical totals and definitely aren't accurate for older apps. A few of you called it out immediately and you were right. There's no mailing list, no CRM, no tracking pixels, nothing is going to keep emailing anyone.

    What the barrel actually does: it only runs if a dev integrates it. Events are tied to the unique ID Garmin itself hands the app for users, which is anonymous (no PII, no cross-app correlation, no account linking). The full list of fields is in the privacy policy on the site, and that same list is what the dev declares in the store submission when they ship. I know the site assumes too much context right now. I'm going to add a proper "what we collect" page and some diagrams so this doesn't have to be taken on faith.

    About it being closed source: I'll probably publish the client source, and hope to be soon. The barrel is minified for disk space on the device, not to hide anything, and anyone with a few minutes can already look inside. If someone wants to walk through it now I'll do it right here in the thread.

    The one thing that actually keeps me awake is the size of the library. It fits under 10 KB on most devices, but older watches have very tight background memory budgets and I know some integrations are painful. I guess it will be solved as older devices are deprecated but meanwhile I will find ways to reduce it.

    Last bit: Tinymetrix is one person, me, doing this as a solo indie project. Not an excuse for the sloppy launch, but it explains some of it.

    Happy to take follow-ups here and hopefully add some value to garmin community.

  • in reply to testica
    testica said:
    barrel is minified for disk space on the device

    What does that mean? We're not optimizing for disk space on the computer we use to build the app, are we? Having a function or variable name with a long, descriptive name will compile (in release mode) to the same code as a 1 letter name.