The openness of the Android Market

Well, yesterday my app passed 1,000 downloads and I'm happy. But I'm less happy in seeing that the percentage of active installs is going down since ten days: after having been steady at 45/46% for a couple of months, it dropped to 38%. The strange thing is that in the latest ten days I've released two new versions with new features and bug fixes. The few users I'm in touch with are saying thumbs up. There could be worrying reasons (the most obvious ones) or not worrying ones (for instance, the app has been talked about in some forum of birdwatchers from geographical areas that are not supported yet, and they realize after installing the app). So, it's really frustrating for some aspects not being able to know what's going on - especially when I think that Google has got all the statistics about why users are uninstalling my app (for people not knowing the Android Market: whenever you uninstall an application downloaded from the market, the smartphone asks why you're doing that).So, the Android Market is much more open than the Apple Store, it is also open since it allows competitors, but it's not as open as one would want.

Date: August, 22 2010
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/fabriziogiudici/archive/2010/08/22/openness-android-market

Others News