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Many times, it is important for you to know the users who have reinstalled the app so that you can treat them separately in your user flows and other marketing segments and communications. We have seen a lot of our users give out first-purchase discount coupons. Because of the inability to differentiate between Install and Reinstall, the onboarding / first purchase campaigns are sent to the same user after every reinstall by the user. To prevent this from happening, we now allow our users to track reinstalls for their users which makes their first purchase/activation campaigns more effective. MoEngage tracks the reinstalls happening on your iOS and Android apps automatically.

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Reinstall Tracking on iOS

MoEngage iOS SDK can detect when a reinstall happens on any specific device for a particular app basis two distinct anonymous ids that are saved locally on the device and changed when a reinstall happens. When a reinstall is detected, MoEngage iOS SDK will track an event - “REINSTALL” and this can be used to exclude users who reinstalled the app from your campaigns.

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Reinstall Tracking on Android

Reinstalls on Android are detected differently than on iOS and may not be completely accurate. Nevertheless, we allow our users to track reinstalls for their android app users as well.

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How do we track reinstalls on Android?

For tracking reinstalls on Android, we depend on Google Advertising Id, unique_id which is saved locally by the SDK, and push token (FCM token) which changes on every reinstall. By observing and detecting a change in the push token and unique_id saved by the SDK, we can predict if a user has reinstalled the app. Please note that reinstalls can only be tracked for up to 60 days. Meaning, if a user reinstalls the app after 60 days of uninstalling, we would not be able to identify a reinstall.

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Data Tracking for ReInstalls

Every time a reinstall is detected on Android or iOS, MoEngage will track the below data points automatically which you can use in your Segmentation / Analytics / Campaigns as required -

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USER ATTRIBUTES

  • Device Reinstall: Every time a reinstall is detected, we save Device Reinstall: True in the user profile.
  • User Reinstall: Every time a reinstalled user logs into an already identified (existing user where ID exists) user in MoEngage, we save an attribute User Reinstall: True in the user profile.
User Attributes for reinstall are generally used in your Event Triggered Campaigns, Flows, and Analytics.

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EVENTS

  • Device Reinstall: This event is tracked every time a reinstall is detected.
  • User Reinstall: This event is tracked when a reinstalled user logs into an already identified (existing user where ID exists) user in MoEngage who is marked as uninstalled (Install Status: False) and because of the login, the status user gets marked as installed (Install Status: True).
Events for reinstall are generally used in Segmentation and Analytics.

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Limitations

  1. If a user clears data on the device and push_id is also changed - In this case we will treat it as a case of “reinstall” instead of “data cleared on existing device”
  2. If a user uninstalls the app resets Google Advertising Id and installs the app again, we will treat it as a new install.
  3. If you have opted out of GAID tracking (Google Advertising Id), reinstall tracking will not work.
  4. If the push token changes without the user uninstalling the app and the user logs out of the app at the same time, we may end up detecting this user as a reinstall.