CIQ store: App download numbers now rounded to nearest integer power of 10 or 5 * power of 10 (e.g. 100+, 1K+, 10K+, 50K+, 100K+, 500K+, 10M+)

This change happened today.  I don't like it.  I was just looking at my downloads of my new data field this morning.  Yesterday it was 88 downloads, this morning at around 9am ET, it said 96, now at nearly 3pm ET, it says 10+.  

jim_m_58 said:

if you have well over say 100k, it will show 100k until it hits 150k?. 

No, I think it will show 100K+ until you hit 1M+. That's why I said "rounded to nearest power of 10 (e.g. 100+, 1K+, 10K+, 10M+)" in the post title, but ig you either ignored that or chose not to believe it.

Of course I can't prove it, but I don't see any estimated download numbers in the store (including my own apps) that aren't an integer power of 10.

EDIT I was wrong lol

jim_m_58 said:

It's not like this is saving any space. 50,000 takes as much as 89,543!

Saving space where? On the backend? Obviously not, as the real number is still stored on the backend.

In the UI? Yes, because "10M+" is objectively shorter than "19,123,945".

But like I said, I think it's to *simplify* things for the end user, not necessarily to save space.

Then again, the motivation for originally doing this in the Connect IQ app was probably both to save space in the UI *and* simplify things for the user. (Especially given that both the download numbers and review numbers are rounded/abbreviated there.) EDIT: review numbers in the CIQ app aren't rounded to the nearest power of 10 though. For low numbers they're displayed without rounding, but for high numbers are rounded more traditionally (e.g. "148k")

I also wanted to originally speculate that maybe this change was made in an attempt to prevent Connect IQ devs from somehow gaming the system, but that probably doesn't make any sense. Or does it?

I do think this sucks for anyone who wanted to track their own apps download numbers over time.

I noticed that even the download count returned by the app info endpoint appears to be rounded to the nearest power of 10, so it seems they really don't want us to know (or they don't care to transmit the exact number of the wire for whatever reason now).

e.g. Spotify

Store page: [https://apps.garmin.com/apps/30c6c876-ba43-4cbb-b4c7-03583a7cb66b]

app info endpoint: [https://apps.garmin.com/api/appsLibraryExternalServices/api/asw/apps/30c6c876-ba43-4cbb-b4c7-03583a7cb66b]

...
"downloadCount": 10000000,
"changedDate": 1723035429000,
"averageRating": 4.7,
"reviewCount": 148124,
...

Anyway, a charitable interpretation of this is that the website is moving closer to parity with the app ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The next step is round the review numbers to the nearest power of 10.

What I'm seeing is one app that had about 570,000 downloads yesterday that now shows 500,000, so it's not powers of 10.

Looks to me in that range it goes up by either 100,000 or 500,000.  Another app I know was about 98xxx now shows 50,000...

Ok, it sounds like you're seeing something different than I am. You saw my screenshot with "10M+" for spotify.

What do you see for spotify?

It could be that Garmin is doing A/B testing here (showing different things to different people / at different times.)

For spotify, I see 10,000,000

Yes so obviously we are seeing different things. That's why I posted a screenshot

jim_m_58 said:

What I'm seeing is one app that had about 570,000 downloads yesterday that now shows 500,000, so it's not powers of 10.

Looks to me in that range it goes up by either 100,000 or 500,000.  Another app I know was about 98xxx now shows 50,000...

Would you mind posting links to those apps?

Yeah, this one is a hot mess.  The rules are not yet known.  from my own store entries.  My dew data field this morning was at 98 downloads and shows 10+, my widget that was at 309k, now shows 100k+, but my App that was at 9,906 rounded up to 10k+.  So I am not spotting the pattern as to when things get rounded up, but they do in some cases.

App links for reference.

Data Field: https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/apps/4cf6a2fc-e707-4fce-ba4f-7545ca95b20c

App: https://apps.garmin.com/apps/bddf48af-bbdb-425c-bc7f-34309e529a2e

Widget: https://apps.garmin.com/apps/9c692f27-57d6-4488-91ae-5dd846a4ad26

Kind of a tangent but I noticed that if you search the CIQ store app with a string that contains certain special characters (like "Lap+"), the store returns an error ("Server Connection Error"). The same doesn't happen with the website.

Not surprised tbh.