My Windows Phone App Download Stats After Two Years

Two years ago, around April 2011, I wrote a Windows Phone app called lil todo. How’s it doing today?

Before we get to the numbers, some context is useful. lil todo was written for fun and a bit of necessity. I had a Windows Phone and was curious to learn how to write an app for it. I also found there weren’t any good GTD-style to-do apps in the market for the platform, so I wrote my own.

It wasn’t written to make money (it’s free!), so I didn’t do any marketing. It’s been updated a couple of times to fix bugs or add minor features, but for the most part the app you download today is the same one released two years ago. In summary, it’s a neat little app that most people have never heard of, unless they do a search in the Marketplace for it.

With that out of the way, how popular is the app? Two weeks after release, the app was downloaded 218 times. One month after release, the app was downloaded 342 times. For the first few months, the average daily download was around 5-10. After a year, the downloads eventually plateaued to around 2-3 a day. After one year in the market, the app was downloaded about 1400 times.

Let’s skip ahead to two years. Here’s what we see today:

There are a lot of interesting things going on in this graph:

Today, the app has been downloaded over 5800 times.
The cumulative downloads slope is getting steeper. Today the app is downloaded roughly 10 times a day.
Each change in slope is preceded by a spike in daily downloads. I suspect these are when either a new phone is released or the platform is made available to new markets.
There was a huge spike in downloads in February, 2013. What the heck happened then? (A major new market was added? Bad data?)
Not on the graph: Total number of reviews for the US market is 19. That’s pretty low in comparison to a lot of other, more popular to-do apps.
Not on the graph: Total US downloads: 1500. Total India downloads: 1400. That means about half the downloads are coming from the US and Indian markets. The next biggest downloads are from Germany, Colombia, Chile, and Finland (around 300, 260, 230, and 230, respectively).

So there you have it. Even an app that was never localized to non-English locales and is barely updated is still getting downloads.

lil todo vee two

I’m working v2 of lil todo, the to-do list app I wrote for Windows Phone 7 last year.

I wrote lil todo for two reasons:

Provide myself with a good to-do app on Windows Phone. Most of the to-do list apps I tried were utter crap.
Learn how to write Windows Phone apps using Silverlight.

Because it was my first attempt at Silverlight and my focus was to get an app up and running, it wasn’t designed very well. It’s not horrible, but the model code isn’t very portable and contains a lot of things specific to Silverlight.

After writing the app, I realized I really wanted a Windows, Mac, and iOS version so I could access it from my other devices. Unfortunately, the design made it hard to port, which leads me to v2…

To the cloud! (And more)

Now it’s time for v2 and I have a lot of ideas already. Here are my goals for v2:

Move to the cloud. A lot of users complained that they couldn’t sync their data in v1.
Support more platforms. It’s almost 2013; let’s support Windows RT, Mac, iOS, and … command line.
Keep the core model code portable. I’ll write it in C++ this time to make it easier to keep it platform-agnostic.
Write the absolute best-looking to-do app on Windows RT. Most Windows RT apps I’ve seen so far are generic and ugly—no taste. Let’s see if I can do better.
Support live tiles on Windows Phone and WinRT. A lot of users requested this feature in v1.
Add notifications. This is another missing v1 feature.

Command Line?

I’m serious about the command-line interface. I’ve always thought that the best way to ensure that you don’t write too specifically for one platform is to intentionally design your app to handle a text-based mode. If you can handle that as you are designing for a modern UI, your business logic code should be fairly platform-agnostic.

My first prototype, which is partially working already, will be written in Ruby. Ruby’s a great language for rapid prototyping, although I’ve never really used it for that. My plan is to hash out the overall design using Ruby and via a command-line interface. Everything will be done using CLI and will save to temporary storage (maybe not SkyDrive or Dropbox yet). However, the concepts should be absolutely the same as the final product, which I will write in C++ and overlay with a platform-specific UI (i.e. XAML stuff on Windows RT/Windows Phone, and Cocoa stuff on Mac/iOS).

Watch this space for updates during the holidays!

Windows Phone app downloads, one month later

lil todo has been in the app store for about one month now. It hit the marketplace on April 9th and I now have download statistics up to May 8th. And the total number of downloads in the first month is… Drum roll please…

342

Yes, 342 downloads in one month for a free app with no real advertising apart from this blog and a twitter account. Not bad, not great, but decent, I suppose.

There was a large number of downloads in the first week, about 150 and since then it’s leveled off. I’m averaging about 7-8 downloads a day now.

The top three regions for downloads are 1. the US with 198, 2. Germany with 44, and 3. the UK with 33. The next after that is Australia with 12 and Singapore with 11. I wonder if this is a reflection of the Windows Phone user base around the world.

Some nice-lookin’ Windows Phone tiles

I’ve been collecting Windows Phone app tiles in the last month and here are my faves so far. This is a random sampling–other than my own that’s in there, of course. These are just apps that I came across and thought looked nice. In most cases, I’ve never even tried the app, so I can’t vouch for how good they are. But maybe this’ll entice you to download some of them. 😀

Scroll down for links to all apps.

Continue reading Some nice-lookin’ Windows Phone tiles

App download stats after 14 days

I now have stats for lil todo, a WP7 app, for 14 days. lil todo got published to the Windows Phone Marketplace back on April 9th, and because of a 6-day delay to stats for the Marketplace, I have data for up to April 23.

The grand total after 14 days is 218 downloads, which is an average of 15.57 downloads a day. However, the trend looks pretty grim:

The graph you see above is the number of downloads per day from 4/9/2011 up to 4/23/2011.

It’s a pretty steady trend towards zero downloads a day. On the 23rd, there was only 1 download. Granted, I haven’t done much advertising of this app, so take what you will out of these numbers.

Some thoughts and random points:

there are about 100 to-do apps in the marketplace (there were maybe 15-20 when I first started developing mine), so there’s a lot to choose from
most people aren’t likely looking for to-do apps, but they are searching for games, I imagine
do most average people know about the marketplace at all and how to download apps?
this app is free and has no ads, so price isn’t holding people back from downloading it
the second peak you see at 4/18 occurs around the same time as I updated the app, so it’s possible it showed up in some sort of “updated apps” page (?)
the reason for the big debut was most likely the huge visibility of the app in the “new apps” page when browsing the marketplace
my app shows up on page 5 of the “Productivity” category in the Zune app. I assume you move up the pages with more downloads.
the app has around a 4.5 rating with 8 ratings. That means 8 out of 218 people rated it
I’m not sure the new, eye-catching app icon for the 4/18 update made a whole lot of difference
there were 19 downloads in Germany, 21 in the UK, and 127 in the US. All other countries are in the single-digits each.

At the end of the day, though, you have to admit, 218 people downloading an app is a pretty darn small amount. I should try writing a simple fart app as an experiment to see how many downloads I can get from that. 🙂

UPDATE: I checked the stats again and they have been updated. The 4/23 number is now 8 downloads and the following two days (not originally in the graph) are 9 downloads each. From this small sample, it looks like downloads may start to settle at around 8-9 a day.