· 2 min read

Our Approach to Open Source – From SDKs to Data Libraries

Should more companies go full open source with their SDKs? Here's our approach, and what tools we're working on next.

Recently, Mintegral not only announced that they would make their SDK open source but also shared an inside look into how they serve and show ads. And in a move to increase transparency in the industry, they’re now encouraging other companies in the mobile space to do the same.

At GameAnalytics, we’re no stranger to open source. Our C++, C#, and JavaScript SDKs are all open source. Our entire library of SDKs is built on our public data collection API, which is fully transparent and documented (you can review it here).

At the same time, proper data collection is a key part of having useful analytics. So developers can see what events are collected by GameAnalytics in two ways:

  • Our SDK’s provide full debugging options of what is sent to our servers. You can set this flag at integration time and have complete visibility into all events sent.
  • Our Live Feed feature directly displays which events are received and what they contain in the GameAnalytics account.

We’ve also been working towards making more of our tools open source. We took additional steps in this process a few months ago when we open-sourced our Elixir client for Apache Druid and our Ansible role configuring carbon-relay-ng. Past open-source contributions from GameAnalytics also include an Erlang HyperLogLog library, a distributed work scheduler for Erlang systems, and a monitoring framework for the Erlang VM.

We’re a tight-knit team, so we must prioritize our projects strictly to keep our roadmap moving and deliver new features that our community can use to analyze their game’s KPIs better. Along the way, we do our best to share with the engineering community the components we build that may be transferable to other setups.

Should more companies go full open source?

More transparency and increased availability of open-source software in the mobile industry can only benefit developers. So this move from Mintegral is certainly a step in the right direction, which we support and will hopefully be followed by the industry at large.

Have your say

The purpose of open source development is to support the developer community. So your feedback on what specifically you’d like access to would be very valuable. It’s also an interesting insight, which we can all use to develop our tools further. Fill in this short survey to have your say.