Keep track of your App's Market data

If you maintain any Apps in the Android Market then you have probably come across questions like

"How many downloads did the app have last week/month/year...?"

or

"Did the ratings improve since the last update?"

It's not easy to answer those questions since the Android Market's Developer console only gives you the current data. (There is statistics for active installs though.) So you have to keep track of these data yourself.
I found it quite tedious to do this by hand, so I built a little (Java) Selenium test that grabs the data and writes it to disk. Happily, it even runs headless, and can thus be easily put into the cloud. Lately, I fixed it up and put it on github. Hopefully this saves you some time, too.

Wallpaper still does not open

Lately, my Slider Live Wallpaper was "awarded" with a one-star rating again. The comment stated

"It wont even let me open it."

I've blogged about this problem before and now there is even an issue for it. As pointed out in the comments there you can work around this behavior by registering a special activity with the INFO category. This is what I'll do now. Here is a good how-to. But, unfortunately, you can not trigger the wallpaper selection directly, so the best you can do is displaying the list of all the installed live wallpapers. This is still somewhat limited for my taste.

So if anybody knows of a better way to handle this, please comment so that I can avoid above awards in the future.

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?

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. ;-)