I am in the process of releasing my first iPhone app. It's a simple utility, I'd just like to gauge the release process, app lifetime and trends, just so it can help make more realistic choices in future apps.

I think it would be nice to have usage statistics in addition to download stats from Apple. For example, how many times is the app opened by each user, what iPhone OS version do they have, etc. I think some of it would simply be to try and connect to a known URL on one of my domains, passing it anonymous information (let's say, connect to http://mydomain.net/stats?app=myApp&version=1.0.0&os=3.1.2&used=18).

My questions are:

• is that forbidden in any way by Apple's rules? (none that I could find, at least)
• does that seem reasonable to you?
• are there existing frameworks that would do that simpler/better that writing my own code?