I know I said that v0.2.1 would be the final release before public sign-up, but I’ve snuck one more tiny release in! It’s pretty small, but you can read what’s new below.
Table of contents
No more Google Analytics 🥳
Previously, 1Feed used Firebase Analytics (which is essentially re-branded Google Analytics) to keep track of user activity. This is sort of the ‘default’ choice, so I didn’t think much when I first added it. However, I didn’t like this solution for a few reasons:
- I want to respect user privacy, and I don’t want to be sending their activity in the app to Google to be used for advertising purposes.
- Google Analytics is blocked by almost all ad-blockers. The numbers that I was seeing in Google Analytics weren’t even accurate and didn’t match up with reported app usage.
- The Google/Firebase Analytics dashboard is a mess. It’s really difficult to analyse the data and find good business and UX insights.
For these reasons, I have decided to dump Google Analytics, and replace it with Plausible Analytics. Plausible Analytics doesn’t:
- Use cookies
- Generate any persistent identifiers
- Collect or store any personal or identifiable data
That’s right — Plausible doesn’t use any cookies, and doesn’t store your IP address! For more details, check their data policy page.
Plausible also lets me track metrics and events really easily. Since Plausible is privacy-respecting and doesn’t save any persistent identifiers, I can do things such as track what types of feeds users add, or when they click on links, without compromising privacy.
Note that 1Feed never tracks which links you click on in your feed. It will just send an event to Plausible saying “a user clicked on a feed item which was the 3rd item in the feed”. This will give me insights about things like how far back users tend to look within feeds, without giving away any identifying data or usage habits.
Additionally, Plausible visitor hashes reset every 24 hours, which means that your long-term usage habits can never be tracked.
I’m really excited about the new insights that Plausible will give me so I can develop a better app for you all, and the additional privacy and peace-of-mind that it’ll bring to the 1Feed experience.
Demo mode
This release also comes with the code for an awesome ‘demo mode’, which can be seen in the live demo on the landing page. When in this mode, the app will become read-only and give you a feel for 1Feed without having to sign up or configure anything. This addition doesn’t change anything in the actual app — only when it’s embedded on the landing page.
Minor changes
Well, there’s really only one minor change, but I didn’t feel like it deserved its own heading 🤷♂️
1Feed will no longer show a confirm dialog when you try to delete a folder with zero items. This makes it faster and easier to delete folders when there’s no data loss involved.
That’s all!
Well, that was easy. 1Feed will transition to public sign-up in a few days, and unless other things come up, this will be the final release before then. See you on the other side of a public sign-up button! 👋