  Software logs are of great value in both industrial and open-source projects.
Mobile analytics logging enables developers to collect logs remotely from their
apps running on end user devices at the cost of recording and transmitting logs
across the Internet to a centralised infrastructure.
  This paper makes a first step in characterising logging practices with a
widely adopted mobile analytics logging library, namely Firebase Analytics. We
provide an empirical evaluation of the use of Firebase Analytics in 57
open-source Android applications by studying the evolution of code-bases to
understand: a) the needs-in-common that push practitioners to adopt logging
practices on mobile devices, and b) the differences in the ways developers use
local and remote logging.
  Our results indicate mobile analytics logs are less pervasive and less
maintained than traditional logging code. Based on our analysis, we believe
logging using mobile analytics is more user centered compared to traditional
logging, where the latter is mainly used to record information for debugging
purposes.
