From what I've seen, there are two important stats that seem to run
the popularity numbers in the market, installed base and retention
percentage. When you've driven your app to the top of the "just in"
tab, many times users who might not really be interested in your app
will download it to give it a try, also it will attract developers who
are looking at the competition. On average a lot more of these
downloads will be uninstalled, as the user wasn't really interested in
doing anything but taking a peek. This will lower the app's retention
percentage by a large margin.

On the other hand, if your app is actually worth keeping and is found
by someone looking for what it does, the retention percentage will be
much higher and this will cause your app to rise in popularity.

Just something to think about for those that are constantly doing
this, you may be sabotaging yourself in your zeal to gain download
numbers.

Excellent analysis.

What you're essentially saying is that if your app is unlikely to be kept by
people "taking a peek," driving it higher in the "just in" list will
decrease your overall popularity.

I suspect this is more a matter of how compelling the app is, and how
accurately it's title and description convey exactly what it does.

I find most of the apps that are "Gaming" like this are the junk apps who
benefit when people forget to return them in time; stuff like "Sexy Lady
xxx" and others of that ilk.

Our experience, after both updating weekly sometimes as well as going months
without an update, has been that the retention rate remains the same. We
take this as evidence that users understand what our app does before
downloading, and that exposure is proportional to both downloads and sales.

Perhaps the best "take away" from your analysis is that people should
closely monitor the retention rates and how they map to exposure, so that if
someone cares about overall popularity, they don't shoot themselves in the
foot.

Thanks for starting this interesting conversation.

Scott,
SoftwareForMe.com

On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 8:43 PM, Maps.Huge.Info (Maps API Guru) <

All well, but you haven't explained what other behaviors are possible to
expose an app?

The market as such has:
-) the most popular tab, where you have little control in being listed
in the top10.
-) the most recent tab, where you can control if you are in the top10.
-) a search that is a joke. Serious, it was done my an intern who was
not yet sure if he wants to go int CS?

So please explain to me how else one can get exposure? Yes, one can try
to do a classical marketing with ads, paid bloggers, and so on, but that
costs. If the cost is not expressed in monetary units, it costs in time
units.

Andreas

Am Freitag, den 30.10.2009, 20:43 -0700 schrieb Maps.Huge.Info (Maps API
Guru):

signature.asc < 1K Download

This new Droid thing from Verizon is going to change the game a bit.
It may get 100,000 sales the first month, perhaps even more, and over
the course of a year, we should see a doubling or tripling of the
number of Android/market capable devices in the hands of users.
Android has gone from a curiosity to a contender.

If the iPhone model is used, then basically the market is the
marketing plan and we're all pretty much stuck with what Google does
with that program. The 2.0 market app might be better, it might be the
same. I've got a good feeling Google will beef up that program
somewhat in the next few months, they have to or risk losing the
confidence of their developer community.

I don't believe there is going to be any traction from alternative
market schemes. They are the 1% solution and as such not worth the
effort. If these alternate market apps aren't included with the
device, very few users are going to download it.

Then there is the pay vs. ad revenue model. With the current ability
of a user to be able to simply back up the app and return it for a
refund, then restore it to their device, or download it from one of
the pirate sites, the pay model is kind of a bust. Until Google allows
the developer to validate the user, it will be fraught with piracy and
cheating. The ad model is good, but the problem is AdSense is severely
restricted (100,000 pageviews a day minimum!) and other schemes like
Admob have such low quality ads, poor performance (slow to load) and a
dubious reputation to make them suspect as well.

My revenue plan is to allow our apps to accumulate users to the
100,000 pageview a day level and then implement AdSense. We've had
great success with that model in the web world and have high hopes for
the Android and AdSense. It may take a long time to reach that level
but with potentially many millions of devices, it won't be forever.

-John Coryat

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