Choosing a Mobile Product Dataset

Products Overview

Before you perform an analysis, it is important to identify the products that you want to include. You can select any of the following Mozilla's mobile products:

Firefox Lite was formerly known as Rocket. It is only available in certain countries in Asia Pacific. For more information on Firefox Lite data, see the telemetry documentation.

Focus is known as the privacy-focused mobile browser that blocks trackers by default. It does not store a browsing history.

Klar is the known release name for Focus in Germany.

For more information on how telemetry is sent for iOS apps, see the telemetry documentation.

Some telemetry is also sent by FirefoxReality and some non-Mozilla forks of our browsers. It is recommended that you filter on App Name to make sure that you are looking at only the app for which you want to analyze data.

Raw Pings

Mobile data is structured differently when compared to desktop data. Instead of sending a main ping, mobile has provides the following key types of pings:

• core
• events

The core ping is sent once for each session. It includes a much smaller set of metrics than the main ping because of network and data size constraints. All mobile apps send the core ping. For more information on the core ping, see the telemetry documentation here.

Event pings are not sent for all products. They are sent by Focus Android, Focus iOS, Klar, Firefox for FireTV, Firefox for Echo Show, and Firefox Lite. Event pings are sent more frequently than core pings, at most once per 10 minute interval. If a ping records 10,000 events, it is sent immediately unless it is within 10 minutes of the last event ping sent: in this case some data may be lost. For more information about the event ping, see the telemetry documentation.

Fennec (Firefox Android) does not send event pings. Instead, it includes a saved_session ping with the same format as main pings. However, it is only available for users who have installed a pre-release and a few users who have installed a release. In both cases, they must have opted into signing up for telemetry collection. Data from this collection must be treated with caution because it is based on a biased population and therefore should not be used to make conclusions about Fennec users.

For more information on the implementation of the event pings and to view event descriptions for Focus, Firefox for FireTV, or Firefox for Echo Show, see the following documentation:

Core Ping Derived Datasets

telemetry.core

For most analyses of mobile data, you need to use the telemetry.core table. It includes data for all the non-desktop Firefox applications that send core pings.

You need to filter on app_name and os because Firefox iOS and Firefox Android have the same app_name. It is recommended that you always filter on app_name, os, app version (found as metadata_app_version) and release channel (it is located under metadata as metadata.normalized_channel).

Versioned tables are available for core ping storage for historical reference, but a table without a version suffix always represents an up-to-date table. It is recommended that you use the unversioned table, so you can be sure your analysis is based on up-to-date information.

The seq field indicates the order in which pings are sent. A record includes seq = 1, which represents the first ping that is received for a client id. It can be used as a proxy to identify new users.

Event Ping Derived Datasets

There are two tables for mobile event data: telemetry.focus_event and telemetry.mobile_event.

As the name suggests, one table includes the event pings from Focus (iOS, Android and Klar). The other table includes the event data for other apps. Both tables use the same format and columns.

telemetry.mobile_events

The telemetry.mobile_events table includes event data for Firefox for Fire TV, Firefox for Echo Show, and Firefox Lite. A metadata column with a list of metrics is also included.

Like when querying telemetry.core, multiple applications are included in each table. It is recommended that you filter at least app_name and os. Be sure that no app_version field is included in these tables: if you want to filter or join a specific version, you must have already identified the corresponding metadata.app_build_id(s) for the app_version by contacting the engineering team that has created the app.

A few other applications also send event data to this table, including Lockbox and FirefoxReality. For more information about the event data that is sent from these applications, see their documentation.

telemetry.focus_events

The telemetry.focus_events table includes event data for Focus Android, Focus iOS, and Klar.

Like when querying telemetry.core, multiple apps are included in each table. It is recommended that you filter on at least app_name and os. Be sure that no app_version field is included in these tables. If you want to filter or join a specific version, you must have already identified the corresponding app_build_id(s) for the app_version by contacting the engineering team that has created the app.

A few other applications send data to this table. However, it is recommended that you use this table only for analysis of event data from Focus and its related apps.

Notes

Each app uses a unique set of release channels. Most apps include a nightly, beta, release, and an other channel. Each channel is used during various stages of development: generally users sign up to test a pre-release version (anything other than release). In Focus Android, the beta channel uses the same APK in the Google Play Store as the release channel. However, beta users get access to this version earlier than users who receive the final release.

As soon as the release version is published, beta users work with the same version of the app as users who have received the final released version. Both versions of the software become indistinguishable from each other unless you perform a query that flags them by client_id. Beta releases have normalized_channel tagged as release. If you want to filter for beta users, you can only identify the beta users by checking for a higher version number than the version number and date that have been assigned to the official release.

Upcoming Changes

The Android apps now use Glean, the new mobile telemetry SDK, which has been integrated with Project Fenix. Additionally, existing apps have been updated to Glean during the second half of 2019. Glean now sends baseline, metrics, and events pings instead of core and event pings. For more information about Glean, see the Glean GitHub page or #Glean in Slack.