Sometimes stats can be a little misleading, sometimes, the data you have isn't the whole picture and that can mean the wrong decision can be made as the missing parts of the puzzle could change everything.
When releasing an app, I like to know how it is going. How many installs? on what days? any reviews?
All of this data can help make decisions on the effectiveness of changes made to your app, or your marketing strategy. So for me, this is an important part of the App and Play Stores - and both let me down a bit.
Let have a quick look at each of them (the way I use them, anyway). There might be some stuff that I have missed, and I always appreciate feedback if you have any!
I'll start with the Play Store as that is where I first launched Save My Bacon.
Play Store
When you first log into the Play Store and go to your app list, you get a screen like this:
If this is legible (or can be expanded) you'll see the summary line for apps. Here I have had the game installed 46 times and quite a few people have uninstalled it. It just isn't sticky...and I know that (we're getting there). There are 11 ratings, with an average rating of 4.55. Not too bad.
One thing that I was a little disappointed about is that the Installs stats only seem to update once per day. I realise this is probably fine for most people, but hey, this is my first game app...I'm impatient!
The good news is that the ratings seem to be visible once they are posted. Now that I am happy with as it let's me respond quickly - and people like that.
Next, let's see what those ratings are. A quick click on the Ratings, and we have the following (foul language warning ahead!):
From here you can see the detail of what has been rated and any comments the user chose to leave.
This is a powerful section as you can get some insight into why people are rating your app the way that they do. Looks like someone HATES ads! BTW - Anyone can comment and say pretty much anything...be prepared.
Finally, the summary stats. These are mostly around devices, with some Android version stuff thrown in. I don't find this particularly useful, but my app is simple...perhaps if it was more complex, this would be pure gold.
I find the Play Store pretty useful. It would be nice if the Ratings were simply a pop-up instead of taking you away from the screen, and the navigation isn't quite smooth, but in reality, this is a pretty effective couple of screens that I use daily.
So far, a couple of weeks in, and limited marketing until the start of the "Sticky" releases, we have progressed. I'm learning my way around the tools to see what each can do, and hopefully will be prepared to use what I have learned once we start to hit marketing in full swing.
You know, there is a part of me that wants to start NOW - "Get it out there" so to speak, but the other part of me says "you don't want people to write it off first time without giving it a chance". So I am in a bit of a quandary.
Anyway, tomorrow I'll show you around the App Store interface as I know it.
...the journey continues!
AG
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