Getting Specific iOS Device Names from Google Analytics for iOS v2

Question

I've integrated the Google Analytics for iOS library into my application, and in general it's working. I see results on the web dashboard, but ... every iPad is reported as "Apple iPad" and that's not specific enough for my needs.

I'd like to be able to override the ga:mobileDeviceModel or ga:mobileDeviceMarketingName with a more specific label like "iPad 3 Retina", "iPad Mini", etc.

My app easily determines which device it is running on, and composes a string like the ones above, but I can't get these to show up in the Google Analytics reporting.

Has anyone done this successfully?

Answer 1

The solution, in my case, was to create a custom dimension on the Google Analytics web interface, which I called MobileDeviceNameSpecific, and then add code to the iOS app to set that custom dimension value in the -viewDidAppear: method of my view controllers, as described in the documentation on the Google Analytics developer site.

Now that I've done that, I can view the devices which have been used by selecting MobileDeviceNameSpecific as a secondary dimension in the Devices report on the Google Analytics web reporting dashboard, which shows the values sent from the iOS app, indicating the specific device in use (e.g. "iPad 3", "iPad Mini").