September 29, 2010

Installing a wallpaper should be easier

Live wallpapers are great for showing off your Android phone, especially in an Android vs iPhone battle. Make sure to install "Show Off" from the market to be well-prepared.

A while ago I've done my first own live wallpaper. It is called "Slider" and is basically a 15-puzzle-like tile animation of an image selectable from the phone's gallery. It hasn't gained much attention (downloads) though. I wonder if many people try out live wallpapers regularly. Guess not, probably stick with a good one after a while.

Lately, I had a little email conversation with one (of the few) downloaders. It went like this:
DL: "Does not work!"
Me: "Could you explain..."
DL: "Does not open!"
Me: "Did you try HomeScreen>Menu>Wallpapers..."
DL: "That's not the problem, can not open, only uninstall."
Me: "Do any other live wallpapers work?"
DL: ">App will not open. no wallpapers at all. i do not know what do they look like. the app does not open..."
Me: "Live wallpapers are not applications, so you can not open them. This is why the button "open" does not work.You start a wallpaper from the menu "wallpapers" of your homescreen..."

This shows another problem with live wallpapers. Installing from the market is not as easy as it should be. I don't know why the "Open" button is just disabled, would be much better IMHO to at least let it open the list of installed wallpapers or the settings activity for the downloaded wallpaper. What do you think?

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.

About Me

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