The next version of Maxi80 iPhone application will include a very simple user tracking capability : each time a user listens the web radio for more than n seconds, the application will ping one of my servers, allowing me to collect stats such as date and time, ip address, device model (iPhone, iPod Touch,…) and iOS version number.

Most of this information is also available to the web radio admin through the Shoutcast log files – but I don’t have access to these.

On the server side, I am calling an IP geo localization service to track countries from where people do listen to the radio.

At the time I am writing this post, the new version of the application was submitted to Apple for validation.  This means that only Apple and myself have a version at our disposal for testing, the application is not distributed to the public yet.

In other words, every ping request I am seeing on my server is either coming from me, either from Apple.  Despite this, I am seeing requests from many different countries : Belgium (these are mine), United States West Coast (this should be Apple), United States East Coast (maybe Apple has iPhone Apps validators working from there too).  But I also got requests from two weird locations : Pakistan (Islamabad) and Greece (Athens).

I tested these two IP addresses on many geo localization services and they all gave me the same result.

My conclusion : either Apple tests our iPhone applications from the three continents (America, Asia and Europe), either something is flawed with IP Geolocalization services.

Should you have a good knowledge of IP geo localization inner working – or – from Apple’s iPhone Apps validation process, do not hesitate to leave a comment 🙂