dale lane

A month ago, I submitted an app to the Android Market app store for the first time, and shared the experience – from compiling the app to it being live in the Market on people’s phones.

I thought I’d follow this up with a quick post on what happens after your app goes live in the Market.

Again, as before, this is aimed at the idle curiosity of people who use mobile app stores, rather than trying to replace the detailed documentation provided for mobile developers.

Crash reports

My favourite part are the Error Reports. As a developer, you can see when your app crashes on people’s phones. You can see how often it happens, how many people it has affected, and how many times it has happened.

I’ve not had any errors (I’m almost disappointed! 😉 ) so the screenshots on the Android developer’s blog are perhaps a better example. You can see that not only do you get told that an error has happened, but (as these are Java apps) you get the stack trace at the point of the error, telling you exactly where the app crashed.

This should make it a million times easier to debug buggy apps – it’s the sort of functionality that I’ve tried to manually build into apps before, but with Android you get it out-of-the-box. This is awesome.

User feedback

You can see the number of users who have rated the app (8 – in the screenshot above), and the average rating.

You can also see comments that users have left about the app.

Install stats

You can see how many people have installed the app.

The stats are divided into “total” installs (how many phones has the app been installed on) and “active” installs (how many phones is the app installed on now).

The difference is obviously an indication of how many people didn’t like it and uninstalled it!

I’ve added some notes on the graph above. “gadgeteer” refers to when the app got a mention in at gadgeteer.org.uk.

The numbers are when I released new versions of the app – it’s interesting to see that I got a spike in downloads when I released v1.4 (even though it was just a minor bug fix). I guess this got me onto a list of new or recently updated apps which increased the apps visibility for a day. I wonder if this is repeatable – are frequent updates a way to boost your install stats?

The install numbers are very low. Fewer than 1000 downloads in a month. I made no other efforts to promote the app, as I was curious to see how many users would just come across it in the Market. I find it quite hard to find stuff in the Market – it’s not easy to browse, and the search facility is primitive. I think the low number of downloads I got is an indicator of how easy it is to get lost in the swamp of other apps in the Market. (That said, I don’t have much evidence of this other than my gut feeling and the comparison with the far higher number of downloads I used to get for apps I used to write for Windows Mobile).

Overall, as I said before, Android Market is very impressive and provides a great way of distributing apps. The discovery bit just needs to get a little better, and it’ll be almost perfect.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 15th, 2010 at 9:22 am and is filed under tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.