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) < [email protected]> wrote: > I've noticed a lot of developers update their apps every dozen or so > days just to keep at the top of the "just in" tab. While this might > seem like a good idea for a totally unknown app, if you've gotten any > traction at all in the market, say below the magic #750 in overall > popularity, it could actually be a way to reduce your popularity > position. > > 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. > > -- > > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Android Discuss" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]<android-discuss%[email protected]> > . > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss?hl=en. > > > -- Warm regards, The PhoneMyPC Team -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss?hl=en.
