PreCentral: HP updates webOS Developer Center, adds reporting graphs and app privacy policies

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HP updated the webOS Developer Center today to add in sales reporting graphs, a move presumably brought on or sped up by the planned shuttering of Metrix last month, as well as adding more compliance with state and federal laws requiring developers to provide privacy policies when their apps access certain user data which has been an issue on iOS and Android over the past few months.

The App Catalog was updated in weeks prior to allow users to see the app's privacy policy but developers were unable to actually add one in until this past weekend. This new functionality allows a developer to provide a privacy policy for an individual app or a company-wide policy. This should add a bit of reassurance to every user knowing that they should soon see a privacy policy for most, if not all, apps that are required to provide one under applicable state and/or federal laws.

The other major update of the day is the addition of sales data in the form of graphs. Earlier today the data was available but many a developer tweeted back to the developer relations team to let them know the displayed numbers were horribly off. I personally noted a nearly twenty-fold increase in numbers under "active users" versus actual download numbers.

This is a welcome change, of course, because developers have been asking for an integrated solution for some time now. This does not yet not replace Metrix or true analytics systems, however, because while it does provide some information such as active users and download statistics it falls short of providing detailed user data such as device type, the version of webOS being used, screen resolution, and the language of the users. That data is critical to developers and we hope HP adds at least some of it in to the developer portal, even if it requires an extra Enyo or Mojo library be added to the app.

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