Google Analytics: tracking offline mobile apps

Question

We're tracking our web apps using GTM (Google Tag Manager) and GA360 (the paid version of GA).

We also have hybrid mobile apps (mobile apps built with web frontend) that are intended for our users to work mostly offline (they are kind of reader apps). I've been doing some research and there's a lot of information but I'm not sure yet of what's the best approach to connect my mobile apps to GA when they're mostly offline.

I've found Google Analytics for Firebase which is a free service but seems to be a separate service from GA and I would end up with half of the analytics in GA and the other half in Firebase.

I also read about using Workbox to support Offline Google Analytics: https://developers.google.com/web/tools/workbox/guides/enable-offline-analytics

What's actually the best approach for this kind of problem? What service(s) can I use to solve this problem?

Thank you.

Answer 1

I'm not sure if either of the other two approaches mentioned above are better or even work in this context, but I wanted to mention a third approach, linked below.

It is not simple, involving writing custom google analytics calls to check online status, and either queue requests yourself when offline, or post them when online.

It should work well though, and end up keeping all of your analytics in one console.

Simo Ahava Blog: Track users who are offline in Google Analytics.