Mobile Libraries - 2.x - 4.x

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These are legacy versions of Tealium's mobile solutions. Please use the new 5.x series libraries.

• How Tealium's Mobile Libraries Work
• Full Library
• Compact Library
• Collect Library

How Tealium's Mobile Libraries Work

In order to leverage Tealium's mobile solution, you must add our code, that is one of our mobile libraries, into your app's code. Depending on what tracking approach you want to take, we offer several libraries to meet your needs. If you're not sure which library is best for you, talk to your Tealium account or deployment manager. Tealium's libraries, with the exception of the Collect library, use a webkit object in order to leverage Tealium's Tag management system. The webkit object is like a web browser, but it doesn't display pages in your app. This allows your app to run JavaScript, primarily Tealium's Tag management code and load Tag vendor code.

Your mobile developers must include Tealium's library into the app's code. The instructions that mobile developers need in order to add Tealium's libraries to your app are publicly available on Github. For a directory of the repos for each platform, see this article. So the question remains. Which library should you use?

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Full Library

Tealium's Full library tracks standard data on stock events and screenviews automatically. The Full library automatically tracks:

• UI events: interactions with UI elements, such as buttons
• non-UI information: application data, device info, carrier data, and timestamps
• lifecycle events; app launch, wake from background, and sleep
• video event tracking: play, pause, stop

The Full library also gives you access to a couple useful tools:

• Mobile Companion
• AudienceStream traces for your mobile app

In addition, you can track whatever custom data you choose by having your developers set it up in the app's native code.

The Full library does track a lot of data automatically, but you may find that you don't want to tracking absolutely everything. This is often too much data! If that's the case, take a look at the Compact library instead.

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Compact Library

The Compact Library is smaller, taking up less memory and less time to initialize. For the most part you'll have to specify what you want tracked with the Compact library. However, there are a few things it will track automatically:

• Lifecycle events: app launch, wake from background, and sleep
• Device info: model, CPU, device specifications, etc.
• Timestamps: The time when each event occurred

If you want to track screenviews and any other events, you need to treat those as custom data tracking and set them up manually in the app's code. While this may take more initial effort, the library ends up being smaller and running more efficiently than using the Full library.

Full vs. Compact Comparison

Tracking	Compact	Full
Custom Data Tracking	Yes	Yes
Device Data Tracking	Yes	Yes
Lifecycle Tracking	Yes	Yes
Offline Tracking	Yes	Yes
Timestamp Tracking	Yes	Yes
UI Autotracking	No	Yes
Video Tracking	No	Yes
Screenview Autotracking	No	Yes
Tools
AudienceStream Trace	No	Yes
Mobile Companion	No	Yes

Note: For more information on the types of tracking described above, see our mobile features list, located in Tealium's Github repo.

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Collect Library

Use the Collect library when you want to leverage AudienceStream as your primary approach to mobile. Unlike the Full and Compact libraries, the Collect library doesn't use a webkit at all; event tracking and integration with AudienceStream is handled within the app's native code. The main purpose of this library is to capture how users interact with your app and send that data directly to AudienceStream. From there, AudienceStream can connect with other vendors to do things like triggering emails or push notifications. Enriched data can be retrieved as well, allowing your developers to program actions in-app in response to the new visitor data.

As a final note, we recommend that you use the latest version of whichever library you select. The latest version addresses bugs and supports the newest features.

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