Christmas time

Today is Christmas and I decided to not invest money on a new AdMob campaign as I prefer to see what happens in this particular period of the year. The data I collect now could be useful for the next year.

I was tempted to not change anything in my application to see how the Christmas time affect the number of downloads, but in the last days I discovered something very interesting that made me change mind (and feel a bit stupid).

Normally when I look at the statistics of my app I only check the "Active device installs" that summarizes the situation of the installs; the higher the figure the happier I was. In the last two months the active device installs were not growing as I expected and I put the blame on the lack of visibility of the applications in the market.

Although the visibility is a real problem, there is another aspect that should be taken into consideration to explain a slow active installs increment: the tendency of the user to keep the application installed.

Looking at the daily installs and daily uninstalls I discovered that:

I have a daily average of 78 installs but approximately the same number of uninstall

so many daily installs means that the visibility is not the main issue and I have to work in the direction that makes the user to keep the app installed. Since almost all of the user reviews are enthusiastic I think that the app itself does not have any problem and that the big villain is the user interface, which I admit is rather poor.

I spent one week to introduce themes in the application and I created three themes. You can see the screenshoots here below:

If i'm right I should see a decrement of the daily uninstalls. I'll update you in a couple of weeks when the Christmas madness is over.