September 13, 2010

Android Market stats improvement suggestions

Lately, my minesweeper clone (called Mines) passed 50 000 downloads in the Android market. I uploaded the first version of the game in August 2009, so it took quite a while to get there. My users seem to be quite happy with the game though, at least I don't get too many ratings like "Rubbish" or "Uninstalled" ;-) and the rating average is still above 4. Also, the active installs are still above 40 percent.
Thinking of these numbers I came to realize that there are a couple of things I would like to know about the downloads/active installs but that is not provided by the market developer console.
  • I would like to have statistics over time.
  • I would like to filter over languages, would be great for comments/ratings also.
  • I would like to know how the game was found in the market.
The developer console has evolved over the last year, at least you get error stack traces, comments, and ratings numbers now. But there is still a lot of room for improvement.
For now I built a Selenium Test that runs once a day to grab the current download/rating numbers. That should at least allow for some basic statistics on these numbers.

5 comments:

anakin78z said...

Hey,

I've been keeping track of numbers myself by entering them in a google spreadsheet now and then, and graphing that out. I'm curious about your automated setup though. Is it something you could share?
Thanks,
Jens

Matthew said...

Good idea with Selenium seems as there is no current API.

Volker said...

@anakin78z
The DOM includes some ids specific to your account, so my setup won't probably run out-of-the-box for you. This is how it's done:
You start out installing the SeleniumIDE add-on into your firefox installation. This allows you to record the login process.
Then mark the data your interested in and select something like "verifyTextPrensent" from the context menu. Stop recording and export the selenium test as junit (or whatever you prefer). After that you can use SeleniumRC to remote-control firefox and to run that unit test and tweak it to write the data to disk. Let me know if you need more details.

Volker said...

Just found that post introducing Selenium: http://www.skill-guru.com/blog/2010/09/07/unit-testing-with-selenium/

Christian Louboutin said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

About Me

codes for a living and also in his freetime, probably for lack of a real hobby. ;-)