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.

Keep track of your android app stats

Lately, I fiddled around with the google gadget api again. One of the things I like to see on my igoogle page is the current stats of my android apps. Cyrket provides all the relevant data, but their page is to big to fit into a gadget. So I wrote a little gadget that extracts the basic data (rating average, number of ratings, number of comments) and shows just that.

Here it is.

Mines - six months in the market

Mines, my little Minesweeper game, has been in the Android Market for six months now. And I am quite happy with its performance. It still rates above 4 out of 5 points and has been downloaded more than 20000 times. Most amazing to me is the number of active installs, which still is close to 50 percent. So more than 10000 copies are running somewhere in Android land.

The game has been rated by more than 200 people. Unfortunately, Google's Market developer site does not give access to the ratings and comments. And the Market application on the phone just shows the comments for the phone's selected language. But there are solutions to this limitation, like AndroLib.com or Cyrket.com, which allow you to access (hopefully) all comments. Cyrket just came back after having been offline for quite a while, and I was pleased to find out about my first polish comment, which did not show up on AndroLib.

I am still regularly working on the game in my sparetime, which is fun, especially with so many active users. So thanks to all the Mines users out there!

Developer Pride

Visit this post at blogger to see the fancy animation at the top. Nice promo. ;-)

Mines is in the Market

Mines, my minesweeper clone for the Android platform finally made it into the Android market. It was a lot of work but mostly fun. I am not quite satisfied with the art works yet (though I tried my best), so if you want to help improve let me know.

(Download count at the time of this writing: 839)

obfuscate4e 0.7.0 released

Just want to let you know that obfuscate4e 0.7.0 is now available to help you obfuscate your eclipse plugins. The hightlight of this release is automatic detection of classes referenced in extensions. This makes setting up your project for obfuscation a lot easier. So check it out!

Android Minesweeper: Yes we can!

Thanks to my folks from PartMaster I own a Android Dev Phone 1 for a couple of weeks now. I am quite impressed by the Android platform, although the G1 is not quite as slick as the IPhone. But this definitely has a huge potential. Especially the extensiblity and openess are amazing.

Coding for Android is no different from regular java, but it takes a while to get to know the framework concepts and classes. I chose to port the minesweeper code which I already use in eidle. Since I could reuse the model code as is, I had the basic game running within an hour and could then focus on the UI widgets, menus, preferences and lifecycle issues etc. This was really fun and ideal to get used to android. The application is not finished yet, but it is working smoothly already.

Stay tuned for updates.