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Support for multiple users per device

Shivkumar M 20+ yrs shaping technology Product & GTM strategy. Fintech, healthcare & retail industry expertise. Leads product launches, adoption & GTM as Director, Product Marketing.
Support for multiple users per device

In our latest SDK release (Version 2.2) we’ve added support for multiple users per device.

If your app use case calls for multiple users (on the same device) you can use the onUserLogin method to assign each person a unique profile to track their usage separately. The per user tracking gives you a better representation of device usage and metrics.

Here’s how it works:

Each profile is identified by a either a Custom Identity, Email, FBID or Google Ad ID (GPID). When a user logs into your App from a device (using email, FBID, etc) that user will have a unique profile associated with this identifier. Now if a second user logs into the app from the same device (using their own email or FBID, etc) AND you want this user to have a separate profile you’ll call the onUserLogin method to create a separate profile for her.

Each user can now be tracked separately via their separate profiles containing independent activity histories.

Note that if you are sending campaigns to your users (for example a Push Notification campaign) it will be the last user who has logged into the app on that device that will qualify to receive these notifications. You don’t have to worry about any user receiving multiple notifications for each user who has ever logged into that device.

Of course there are legitimate cases where you want to merge the activity of the second user with that of the first on the same profile (say if it is indeed the same user using that app with two different logins).  Accomplish this by using our existing method – profilePush when the user logs in with another identity. This method merges the identify and activity on the first profile.

You can read more about managing multiple profiles per device in our developer docs here.

Posted on July 26, 2016