Mixpanel launches an iOS app with dashboards to help you track data on the go

Data analytics startup Mixpanel today announced the launch of an iOS app. Rather than just package up everything in Mixpanel’s web app, the iOS app displays new dashboards that help give users a quick sense of how the metrics they care about are doing.

The app is free and available today to all Mixpanel customers, cofounder and CEO Suhail Doshi told VentureBeat in an interview. An Android app will come out in the next few months.

“Mixpanel, today, doesn’t have a dashboard for people to quickly get a sense of how their business is doing,” Doshi explained in a chat message. “We felt that starting with a mobile app is a significantly better user experience compared to what people have traditionally done, which is see a bunch of metrics on a Pinterest-like board on their desk. Why? Most people are meetings all day, they’re in line at Starbucks, and they’re on the go. People live on their phones more than they do on their laptops.”

I can confirm this myself. I’m constantly checking the Google Analytics mobile app when I’m on the go, even though its functionality is limited.

Google Analytics isn’t really a Mixpanel competitor, though, Doshi said. That would be companies like Amplitude, Heap, Localytics. And currently they don’t offer mobile apps.

The new app comes with a fairly intuitive experience. When a user signs in, Mixpanel automatically generates charts showing the metrics you check in the web app. You can scrap those charts if you don’t like them and set up funnel, trend line, and retention graphs right from the iOS app.

In time, the app will get smarter.

“Later this year, we aim to become more intelligent by using statistics to alert customers when their metrics deviate in a surprising way using push notifications,” Doshi wrote. “For example, Mixpanel will tell a photo-sharing company about a large spike in the number of photos being uploaded if the app happens to be featured in the App Store.”

San Francisco-based Mixpanel last raised money in December 2014. In November the company announced the Predict feature to show its customers what their users will do next in their apps. The company confirmed a round of layoffs at the beginning of this year.