Using the New Android Market Stats for Fun and Profit

Earlier this week the Android Market Publisher site was updated to include some cool new statistics for your apps. You can now see the user distribution of your app in terms of the countries, languages, operating system versions, and devices on which your apps are running.

Better still, you can compare your app's distribution in each of these categories with the overall distribution for all apps in the Market.

What does this mean?

There are two axes for gaining insight from these figures:

• The distribution of languages, OS versions, devices, and countries of your app users.
• The variance between your app and the overall (expected) distribution.

I looked at the statistics for my three most popular / successful apps: Earthquake, Animal Translator, and Gyro Compass, and have the following observations, conclusions, and action items.

Action Items and Conclusions

• Create a Japanese and Spanish translation of Earthquake.
• Translate Animal Translator into Japanese.
• Modify culturally sensitive place names for Korean users.
• Confirm Earthquake works on small-screen devices.
• Drop platform support for Android 1.5 and 1.6 on Animal Translator.
• For new apps, it's may not be worth supporting Android 1.5 or 1.6.
• For new apps, it's worth launching with localized language support for Korean and Japan.
• When promoting apps, be aware of time-zones.
• Build tablet-targeted versions now to get first-mover advantage.

Observations: Location and Language

• All my apps do disproportionately well in the UK. I'm based in London, so it's likely that my tweeting and blogging have driven more people in my time-zone to my apps.
• The proportion of Japanese and Korean users is effected by how long the app has been around. The older apps have disproportionately more US users and fewer Japanese and Korean users, so  for new apps it's worth building with Japan and Korea in mind at launch. 
• Japanese users account for 10% of Animal Translator users (double the normal distribution). They clearly like the concept, so a japanese language version should help drive popularity.
• Around 70% of Earthquake! users are from the US (expected distribution if 60%). This is likely due to a lot of Android users in the San Adreas fault cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles.
• Earthquake has 1.5% South Korean users versus an average of 10%. Many South Korean users have complained about the USGS use of the name "Sea of Japan" which they believe should be "East Sea". This appears to have a direct impact on their usage of the app.

Observations: OS Versions

• My apps show a trend where older apps have disproportionately more 1.5 / 1.6 users, and new apps have disproportionately fewer. This seems to suggest that owners of these older devices aren't downloading as many new apps. As a result, it might not be worth supporting 1.5 / 1.6 users for new apps.
• Earthquake! already has 0.2% of users running Android 3.0. This suggests that building tablet-optimized versions now can give you first-mover advantage.
• Only 8 people are running Animal Translator on a device running 1.6 or earlier, so I can probably drop support for for < 2.0 in the next update.

Observations: Devices

• Based on the devices, there are no small-screen Earthquake! users. Does the app work on small screens?
• The popularity of devices seems heavily affected by the country distribution of users. For my apps the HTC EVO 4G and Droid series of devices seem very popular in the US, with the HTC Desire and Samsung Galaxy S very popular in Korea and Europe.

What patterns did you see?

What observations and patterns did you find looking at your app statistics?