Exactly this. We're constantly told not to "roll our own X", making paid offerings like Azure App Insights, which is more robust than any hand-rolled solution we could ever develop, so appealing.

We're not trying to sell the user, or their data. We just want to know which features are being used and whether or not it's meeting our performance criteria, thus doing the user a favor by meeting those criteria.

The problem is not informing the user that you use SDKs from third party providers, although using them for login services (Facebook, Google+, twitter) or tracking (Crashlytics, Microsoft App Insights). The other problem is not knowing exactly what these SDKs can collect. They basically have the same permissions as the apps that include them. Crashlytics will collect and send location data alongside bug reports if the crashed app has this permission. (Source: Study on the most popular 200 apps in Germany done on real network traffic. We don't know if the study will be available for the public.)

We are currently pushing for legislation changes in Europe. Users should be informed about SDKs and data destination. Europe has 3 main data sinkholes, Ireland (EU data centres for US companies), Netherlands (Akamai) and Germany (probably selection bias). Nobody knows where the data ends up afterwards and under which legislation it falls.

This is certainly a good move. The Facebook SDK for example is widely used by many apps for Facebook ad performance tracking and analytics and that's something he public should be aware of.

See https://medium.com/ios-os-x-development/libraries-used-in-th... for example

Oh well then, if it's hard then feel free to violate my privacy instead, I'd hate to inconvenience you, the developer! /s

We really need to get over this notion that developer time is the most important thing in the world, it's having negative affects on privacy, performance and probably more. Gigabytes of usage data is really not that much anyway, but even if it is, you don't need to track every single user, just a representative sample.

And don't forget the age old option of not doing analytics, except for marketing purposes I've rarely seen analytics provide more value than it's worth.

haha

I came to say exactly this

Mobile engineer here, I don't know any mobile app without some form of tracking because at the very least you want to know when your app crashes and have a way to get the stacktrace.

Enter firebase crashreporting / crashlytics