index
Statsig client SDK for Android applications. This SDK is open source and hosted on github.
The Basics
Get started in a few quick steps.
- Create a free account on statsig.com
- Install the SDK
- Initialize the SDK
- Fetch Feature Gates, Dynamic Configs, or Experiments
- Log a custom event
Step 1 - Create a free account on www.statsig.com
You could skip this for now, but you will need an SDK Key and some Feature Gates or Dynamic Configs to use with the SDK in just a minute.
Step 2 - Install the SDK
You can install the SDK using JitPack. See the latest version and installation steps at https://jitpack.io/#statsig-io/android-sdk.
Step 3 - Initialize the SDK
After installation, you will need to initialize the SDK using a Client SDK key from the "API Keys" tab on the Statsig console.
These Client SDK Keys are intended to be embedded in client side applications. If need be, you can invalidate or create new SDK Keys for other applications/SDK integrations.
Do NOT embed your Server Secret Key in client-side applications, or expose it in any external-facing documents. However, if you accidentally expose it, you can create a new one in the Statsig console.
In addition to the SDK key, you should also pass in a Statsig user for feature gate targeting and experimentation grouping purposes.
The 3rd parameter is optional and allows you to pass in Statsig Options to customize the SDK.
- Java
- Kotlin
import com.statsig.androidsdk.*;
...
public class MainActivity extends AppCompatActivity implements IStatsigCallback {
...
StatsigOptions options = new StatsigOptions();
options.setTier(Tier.PRODUCTION);
StatsigUser user = new StatsigUser("UUID");
Statsig.initializeAsync(app, "client-key", user, this, options);
...
// SDK is usable, but values will be from the cache or defaults (false for gates, {} for configs)
// Once onStatsigInitialize fires, then
@Override
public void onStatsigInitialize() {
// SDK is initialized and has the most up to date values
}
@Override
public void onStatsigUpdateUser() {
// User has been updated and values have been refetched for the new user
}
}
import com.statsig.androidsdk.*
...
async {
Statsig.initialize(
this.application,
"my_client_sdk_key",
StatsigUser("user_id"),
)
}.await()
Step 4 - Fetch Feature Gates, Dynamic Configs or Layers/Experiments
Now that your SDK is initialized, let's fetch a Feature Gate. Feature Gates can be used to create logic branches in code that can be rolled out to different users from the Statsig Console. Gates are always CLOSED or OFF (think return false;
) by default.
- Java
- Kotlin
if (Statsig.checkGate("new_homepage_design")) {
// Gate is on, show new home page
} else {
// Gate is off, show old home page
}
if (Statsig.checkGate("new_homepage_design")) {
// Gate is on, show new home page
} else {
// Gate is off, show old home page
}
Feature Gates can be very useful for simple on/off switches, with optional but advanced user targeting. However, if you want to be able send a different set of values (strings, numbers, and etc.) to your clients based on specific user attributes, e.g. country, Dynamic Configs can help you with that. The API is very similar to Feature Gates, but you get an entire json object you can configure on the server and you can fetch typed parameters from it. For example:
- Java
- Kotlin
DynamicConfig config = Statsig.getConfig("awesome_product_details");
// The 2nd parameter is the default value to be used in case the given parameter name does not exist on
// the Dynamic Config object. This can happen when there is a typo, or when the user is offline and the
// value has not been cached on the client.
String itemName = config.getString("product_name", "Awesome Product v1");
Double price = config.getDouble("price", 10.0);
Boolean shouldDiscount = config.getBoolean("discount", false);
val config = Statsig.getConfig("awesome_product_details")
// The 2nd parameter is the default value to be used in case the given parameter name does not exist on
// the Dynamic Config object. This can happen when there is a typo, or when the user is offline and the
// value has not been cached on the client.
val itemName = config.getString("product_name", "Awesome Product v1")
val price = config.getDouble("price", 10.0)
val shouldDiscount = config.getBoolean("discount", false)
Then we have Layers/Experiments, which you can use to run A/B/n experiments. We offer two APIs, but we recommend the use of layers to enable quicker iterations with parameter reuse.
- Java
- Kotlin
// Values via getLayer
Layer layer = Statsig.getLayer("user_promo_experiments")
String promoTitle = layer.getString("title", "Welcome to Statsig!");
Double discount = layer.getDouble("discount", 0.1);
// or, via getExperiment
DynamicConfig titleExperiment = Statsig.getExperiment("new_user_promo_title");
DynamicConfig priceExperiment = Statsig.getExperiment("new_user_promo_price");
String promoTitle = titleExperiment.getString("title", "Welcome to Statsig!");
Double discount = priceExperiment.getDouble("discount", 0.1);
...
Double price = msrp * (1 - discount);
// Values via getLayer
val layer = Statsig.getLayer("user_promo_experiments")
val promoTitle = layer.getString("title", "Welcome to Statsig!")
val discount = layer.getDouble("discount", 0.1)
// or, via getExperiment
val titleExperiment = Statsig.getExperiment("new_user_promo_title")
val priceExperiment = Statsig.getExperiment("new_user_promo_price")
val promoTitle = titleExperiment.getString("title", "Welcome to Statsig!")
val discount = priceExperiment.getDouble("discount", 0.1)
...
val price = msrp * (1 - discount);
Step 5 - Log a custom event
Now that you have a Feature Gate or an Experiment set up, you may want to track some custom events and see how your new features or different experiment groups affect these events. This is super easy with Statsig - simply call the Log Event API for the event, and you can additionally provide some value and/or an object of metadata to be logged together with the event:
- Java
- Kotlin
Statsig.logEvent("purchase", 2.99, Map.of("item_name", "remove_ads"));
Statsig.logEvent("purchase", 2.99, Map.of("item_name" to "remove_ads"))
Statsig User
You should provide a StatsigUser object whenever possible when initializing the SDK, passing as much information as possible in order to take advantage of advanced gate and config conditions (like country or OS/browser level checks). Most of the time, the userID
field is needed in order to provide a consistent experience for a given user (see logged-out experiments to understand how to correctly run experiments for logged-out users). If the user is logged out at the SDK init time, you can leave the userID
out for now, and we will use a stable device ID that we create and store in the local storage for targeting purposes.
Besides userID
, we also have email
, ip
, userAgent
, country
, locale
and appVersion
as top-level fields on StatsigUser. In addition, you can pass any key-value pairs in an object/dictionary to the custom
field and be able to create targeting based on them.
Note that in order to update all the evaluations for the gates/configs/experiments/layers for the current user, the SDK needs to make a network request to statsig to get the up to date values. If you don't wait for this API to complete, you won't be operating on the most up to date values.
- Java
- Kotlin
StatsigUser newUser = new StatsigUser("new_user_id");
Statsig.updateUserAsync(newUser, this); // this must implement IStatsigCallback
...
@Override
public void onStatsigUpdateUser() {
// User has been updated and values have been refetched for the new user
}
Statsig.updateUser(StatsigUser("new_user_id"))
Have sensitive user PII data that should not be logged?
No problem, we have a solution for it! On the StatsigUser object we also have a field called privateAttributes
, which is a simple object/dictionary that you can use to set private user attributes. Any attribute set in privateAttributes
will only be used for evaluation/targeting, and removed from any logs before they are sent to Statsig server.
For example, if you have feature gates that should only pass for users with emails ending in "@statsig.com", but do not want to log your users' email addresses to Statsig, you can simply add the key-value pair { email: "my_user@statsig.com" }
to privateAttributes
on the user and that's it!
Statsig Options
You can pass in an optional parameter options
in addition to sdkKey
and user
during initialization to customize the Statsig client. Here are the current options and we are always adding more to the list:
-
api -
String
, default https://api.statsig.com/v1/- The default endpoint to use for all SDK network requests. You should not override this (unless you have another API that implements the Statsig API endpoints)
-
disableCurrentActivityLogging:
Boolean
, defaultfalse
- by default, any custom event your application logs with
Statsig.logEvent()
includes the current top-level activity. This is so we can generate user journey funnels for your users. You can set this parameter to true to disable this behavior.
- by default, any custom event your application logs with
-
disableDiagnosticsLogging:
Boolean
, defaultfalse
- Prevent the SDK from sending useful debug information to Statsig
-
initTimeoutMs:
Long
, default3000
- used to decide how long the Statsig client waits for the initial network request to respond before calling the completion block. The Statsig client will return either cached values (if any) or default values if checkGate/getConfig/getExperiment is called before the initial network request completes.
- if you always want to wait for the latest values fetched from Statsig server, you should set this to 0 so we do not timeout the network request.
- unit is milliseconds.
-
enableAutoValueUpdate:
Boolean
, defaultfalse
- by default, Statsig will only fetch the gates/configs for the user when initialize() is called. This ensures a consistent experience for the duration of a session. If you want to override this behavior and have flags/configs update in near real time, pass
true
instead.
- by default, Statsig will only fetch the gates/configs for the user when initialize() is called. This ensures a consistent experience for the duration of a session. If you want to override this behavior and have flags/configs update in near real time, pass
-
overrideStableID:
String?
, defaultnull
- overrides the
stableID
in the SDK that is set for the user
- overrides the
-
loadCacheAsync:
Boolean
, defaultfalse
- Whether or not the SDK should block on loading saved values from disk.
-
initializeValues:
Map<String, Any>?
, defaultnull
- Provide the
initialize response
values directly to the Android SDK to synchronously initialize the client. You can generate these values from a Statsig Server SDK like the NodeJS Server SDK
- Provide the
-
disableHashing:
Boolean?
, defaultfalse
- When disabled, the SDK will not hash gate/config/experiment names, instead they will be readable as plain text.
- Note: This requires special authorization from Statsig. Reach out to us if you are interested in this feature.
-
customCacheKey:
((sdkKey: String, user: StatsigUser) -> String)
, default:{ sdkKey, user -> "${user.getCacheKey()}:$sdkKey" },
v4.26.0+- By default, client SDKs define a "user" for caching as the set of all IDs (the UserID and CustomIDs) and the sdkKey (so multiple instances dont colide)
- This can mean that a different set of fields will map to the same cached user. The intent is to improve cache hit rate, and provide better defaults
- If you have critical fields that define a user differently which are not considered IDs, you can override the cache key we generate using this function
Methods
- setTier | setEnvironmentParameter | getEnvironment
- used to signal the environment tier the user is currently in.
setTier
can be PRODUCTION, STAGING or DEVELOPMENT. e.g. passing in a value ofTier.STAGING
will allow your users to pass any condition that pass for the staging environment tier, and fail any condition that only passes for other environment tiers.setEnvironmentParameter
can be used for custom tiers, egoptions.setEnvironmentParameter("tier", "test")
Shutting down Statsig
In order to save users' data and battery usage, as well as prevent logged events from being dropped, we keep event logs in client cache and flush periodically. Because of this, some events may not have been sent when your app shuts down. To make sure all logged events are properly flushed or saved locally, you should tell Statsig to flush events when your app is closing:
- Java
- Kotlin
Statsig.shutdown();
Statsig.shutdown()
FAQ
How does the SDK cache locally?
The SDK will cache evaluations fetched from the server locally, so we have default values to use in future sessions in the event the Statsig API is unreachable. The key for this cache is the userID and set of all customIDs { userID, ...customIDs }
. This means that while other attributes may change, if that key remains contstant, the SDK will treat it as the same user. This means cached values could be shared across different user objects. Once the SDK is able to download up to date values for the entire user object, they should be up to date with regards to all user properties.
How do I run experiments for logged out users?
See the guide on device level experiments
Is the SDK thread safe (for multi-threaded languages)?
Even though we try to make the SDK thread safe whenever we can, we make no guarantees that is always the case. Therefore, please make sure to always call Statsig APIs from the same thread.