App uninstall tracking

How does Netcore track app uninstalls?

Keeping track of app uninstalls can provide valuable information on user churn and further help you devise ways to increase retention. Typically, users can uninstall the app due to multiple reasons such as app performance, poor user experience, or technical glitches.

Netcore SDK helps you track app uninstalls by default. It is tracked via the following two ways :

• Silent push notifications

Silent push notifications is a mechanism to check the push token validity. A silent push notification contains an empty message that is sent to the user's device via Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) server for Android devices or Apple Push Notification service (APNs) for iOS devices.

Netcore sends silent push notifications daily to all devices in order to track uninstalls for both Android and iOS applications. We raise an uninstall event for a given device based on a specific error response given by FCM and APNS. It is "unregistered" in the case of APNS and "Not Registered" in the case of FCM.

Please do note that there can be other error reasons that FCM / APNS sends in return, such as bad device tokens or invalid tokens, etc. These reasons are not used to mark the device as uninstalled and we continue to target such devices in subsequent silent push notifications and campaigns.

• Push Notification Campaign
  When a push notification is targeted to devices and FCM/APNS returns an uninstalled error response, then also the given device will be marked as uninstalled.

Note: The timestamp associated with uninstall event for a given user is the time we received Unregistered/Not registered response from FCM or APNS. Please do note that it is not the time that the user had uninstalled the application. Currently, there is no way to determine actual timestamp when the app was uninstalled.