Tealium for Angular JS Impact on Mobile Apps

[oneflash]

Hi community,

A few questions have been raised by a mobile app development team regarding the impact the Tealium for Angular JS has upon the app and the environment. Though impact is a difficult term to quantify, providing a few guidelines might be able to provide us with some basis for answering deeper questions.  Here are my questions and we'll see what frameworks you might be using to answer them:

1) What is the impact on application load time? Of course we can't answer in terms of a percentage of overall app load, but maybe knowing the JS library size and how quickly it loads over various connection speeds would help us answer the question. Ideas?

2) What sort of data usage is added by the app? The initial answer seems like it may come down to how many screens/events are sending data, but knowing what the packet size is for a hit gives us the ability to calculate the data usage impact. Anyone know the answer to this?

3) Here's an odd question thrown our way -- does the JS app impact battery life?

Thanks to anyone and everyone for providing the community with a few thoughts and answers.

[craig_rouse]

@oneflash Are you using an Angular-based mobile app framework (such as Ionic), or are you referring to an Angular-based webview within a native mobile app?

The Tealium utag.js files load pretty quickly from our CDNs, but the real impact on battery would come from how many 3rd party analytics/advertising/other tags you include through Tealium iQ. If you only have a few tags, then the battery impact wouldn't be significant, but if you have 100 different tags, then of course all that data being sent from the device will impact the battery.

Tealium's EventStream solution can help if you have a lot of tags, as a lot of the tracking is shifted from the browser/device to the server-side.

When you ask about "data usage added by the app", are you referring to the Tealium mobile libraries for Android and iOS? If this is the case, then as above, the answer will be variable depending on how many tags you've implemented, but EventStream could certainly help reduce the tracking burden from the device and reduce the impact on the device's battery.

It would help to have some clearer examples of your specific use cases, but I hope this is useful in the meantime.

[oneflash]

Hi Craig, I appreciate your follow-up.

I wish I had more details to provide. We've been told the developer is using "Angular 4.0", and not told much else. We recommended the Tealium-For-Angular mobile libraries approach.

Our plan was to be minimally invasive in adding analytics to their "200 screen" application, with only the sending of a screen view on screen change. All I was hoping for was a way to begin to answer the miscellaneous questions they have been throwing back at us regarding impact -- which for all we know might be their initial defense they use to ask for more time on the project.

Short of them doing A/B testing I cannot think of any way to tell them what to expect. I can't imagine a call to a view command sending more than 2KB, but I would only be guessing.

[craig_rouse]

@oneflash without knowing more about the app, it's hard to give any more valuable input really. The amount of data consumed and the battery used will always depend on the amount of data you send and the amount of client-side integrations you have. If it's really a mobile app, I doubt it is using pure Angular, and most likely using another framework like Ionic, in which case, you could use our Cordova plugin. If you can find out more info about how the app is built, I can certainly give you some more pointers. Sorry I can't be more helpful!