Experiences in Logging Everyday App Use

paper discusses our experiences in logging app use on computers, mobile phones and tablets. We have created logging software to record app launches on iOS, Android and Mac OS X devices, and have used this in a study with 13 students over a period of one month. This paper discusses the practicalities of logging across multiple devices, the forms of enquiry suitable for log analysis, and the ethics of logging. We also discuss future work in which we will scale the study up to thousands of users.