Switchboard - easy A/B testing for your mobile app

What it does

Switchboard is a simple way to remote control your mobile application even after you shipped it to your users' devices. Use switchboard to

Stage-rollout new features to users
A/B-test user flows, messaging, colors, features
anything you want to remote-control

Switchboard lets you control what happens in your app. Quick, easy, useful.

Switchboard segments your users consistently. Because user segmentation is based only on UUID that is computed once, the experience you switch on and off using Switchboard is consistent across sessions.

What it does not do (what you have to do yourself)

Switchboard does not give you analytics, nor does it automatic administration and optimization of your A/B tests. It also doesn't give you nice graphs and stuff. You can get all of that by plugging an analytics package into your app which you're probably doing anyway.

Features

Consistent user segmentation based on device ID
Define experiments for specific application versions, OS version, language settings and more
Comes with build in configuration for production and staging environment
Highly scalable
Safe when device is offline
Flexible custom parameters for experiments

What Switchboard was designed for

Switchboard was design as a super light weight and very flexible mobile A/B testing framework.

Infrastructure

The goal was to serve millions of requests very reliable without much infrastructure. It should easy scale horizontally to avoid overhead in maintaining it while your application scales. It is designed without a database or any other type of persistent storage that would slow it down.

User segmentation

Consistency in user segmentation is one of the most important things in A/B testing. This means that one individual user will always have a consistent experience over time. Switchboard does consistent user segmentation based on a unique device id.

How to use it

Client

The Switchboard client lib is available for android and iOS. The following examples give you a brief overview on how to get started. You can find a more in depth documentation under the Wiki

Android

Link the Switchboard project to your andorid project as a library project. You only need to initialize the Switchboard core at the application start once. Then, you can add switches to your app and have the Switchboard give you the current state.

You can customize the DynamicConfigManager to send all sorts of information to the Switchboard server for control decisions, e.g. location, OS version, device, language.

Here's some on/off switch example code on Android:

  	Context myContext = this.getApplicationContext();
	String experimentName = "showSmiley";
	
	//get settings from Switchboard
	boolean isSmiling = Switchboard.isInExperiment(myContext, experimentName);

	//Switching code for testing
	if (isSmiling) //variant A
		showSmileyWelcomeMessage();
	else //variant B
		showFrownyFace();

And it works for varying any value too. Again, on Android:

	if (isSmiling) {
		if(Switchboard.hasExperimentValues(myContext, experimentName)) {
			
			//get remote controlled values from Switchboard
			JSONObject smileValues = Switchboard.getExperimentValueFromJson(myContext, experimentName);

			int smileWidth = smileValues.getInt("width");

			//do something with it
			prepareSmiley(smileWidth);
			showSmileyWelcomeMessage();
		}
	}

iOS

Please look at the iOS sample implementation under client/ios/SwitchboardSample

Server

The server receives a UUID that the client generated as well as many other parameters like app version, OS version, device language, location. Users are divided into 100 consistent user buckets. Switchboard makes it incredible easy to write new tests based on the given parameters.

Example code of the PHP implementation for a simple on/off switch:

	$manager = new SwitchboardManager($_GET);
	
	//put 50% of your users into the showSmiley A/B test
	$resultArray['showSmiley'] = $manager->turnOnBucket(0, 50);

	//return result array as JSON
	$manager->renderResultJson($resultArray);

You can do more complex things if you want:

	$manager = new SwitchboardManager($_GET);
	$experiments = new SwitchboardExperiments($manager);
	
	//put a percentage of users in the test and vary smile width
	$resultArray['showSmiley'] = $experiments->smileyVariation($uuid, $lang);
	
	//return result array as JSON
    $manager->renderResultJson($resultArray);
	
	class SwitchboardExperiments {
		function smileyVariation($uuid, $lang){

			//turn it on for 50% only
			if ($this->$manager->isInBucket($uuid, 0, 50)){

				$values = array();
				//and then vary the values
				if ($this->$manager->$lang == "eng"){ //broad smiles in US
					$values['width'] = 10;
				} else if ($this->$manager->$lang == "deu"){ //more subtle in Germany
					$values['width'] = 9;
				} else {
					return $this->$manager->inactiveExperimentReturnArray();
				}
				return $this->$manager->activeExperimentReturnArray($values);
			}

			//default
			return $this->$manager->inactiveExperimentReturnArray();
		}
	}

More information on how to use it

Problems & Bugs

Please us the Github Issue tracker to commit bugs

License

Switchboard is licensed under the Apache Software License, 2.0 ("Apache 2.0")

Authors

Switchboard is brought to you by Philipp Berner and Zouhair Belkoura, founders of KeepSafe. We'd love to have you contribute.

Contributors

Special thanks goes to our contributors

Chris Beauchamp

Used in production by

KeepSafe (www.getkeepsafe.com)

ronaldmannak/Switchboard