Android SDK

The Owlmetry Android SDK captures events from Android apps and delivers them to your Owlmetry server. It mirrors the Swift SDK feature-for-feature with Android-native idioms — an Application subclass instead of an iOS @main App, Compose modifiers instead of SwiftUI view modifiers. The core module has a single runtime dependency (kotlinx-coroutines, the Kotlin analog of Swift Concurrency) and handles buffering, delivery, and retry automatically.

The SDK is a static Owl object (com.owlmetry.android.Owl). All calls are non-blocking — events are buffered in memory and flushed in batches. A single Owl.configure() call initializes everything.

Modules

The SDK ships as two Maven artifacts. Add the core module always; add the Compose module only if you want the drop-in UI.

Platform Support

Features

• Event logging — four log levels (info, debug, warn, error) with optional screen name and custom attributes. Owl.error is overloaded — pass a String (logger-style) or pass any Throwable (exception-style; the SDK extracts the runtime type, the JVM stack trace, and the Throwable.cause chain into reserved _error_* attributes). Source file, function, and line are best-effort captured from the call stack.
• Structured metrics — lifecycle operations (startOperation / complete / fail / cancel) with automatic duration tracking, and single-shot measurements via recordMetric.
• Funnel tracking — track user progression through multi-step flows with Owl.step().
• Screen tracking — Modifier.owlScreen() Compose modifier for automatic screen view and time-on-screen tracking.
• Identity management — anonymous IDs generated and persisted in private SharedPreferences, with server-side claim to link anonymous events to real users after login.
• User properties — attach custom key-value metadata to the current user with Owl.setUserProperties().
• File attachments — attach files (logs, failed inputs, binaries) to Owl.error() events via OwlAttachment. See Attachments.
• Offline queue — events are persisted to disk when the network is unavailable and retried automatically when connectivity returns.
• Gzip compression — request bodies are compressed before sending to reduce bandwidth usage.
• Automatic lifecycle events — session_started, app_foregrounded, and app_backgrounded are emitted without any manual calls.

Auto-Captured Data

Every event automatically includes:

• session_id — fresh UUID generated on each configure() call
• Device model, OS version, and locale
• app_version from the host app's package info
• is_dev — true when the host app is debuggable (debug builds), false for release
• _connection — current network type (wifi, cellular, offline)
• environment — android
• sdk_name (owlmetry-android) and sdk_version — auto-stamped on every event

Not yet on Android

A few Swift SDK features have no Android analog yet:

• Install attribution. The Swift SDK auto-captures Apple Search Ads attribution; on Android, install attribution comes from Google Play / the Play Install Referrer and is out of scope for v1. The attributionEnabled configuration flag is reserved.
• Automatic network-request instrumentation. There is no automatic URLSession-equivalent HTTP tracking yet; the networkTrackingEnabled flag is reserved.
• Push registration. Push on Android is Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), not APNs; the SDK does not register FCM tokens for you.

Getting Started

Add the SDK via Gradle, then call Owl.configure() in your Application.onCreate().

• Installation
• Configuration