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+)

I think they are messing with things.  I'll look again after Olathe is done for the day.

sabeard said:

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

This one is very interesting, as you say it has 309k downloads.

The backend app info endpoint shows:

[https://apps.garmin.com/api/appsLibraryExternalServices/api/asw/apps/9c692f27-57d6-4488-91ae-5dd846a4ad26?]

downloadCount: 100000

I'd be curious to see what it would return for an app with 500k downloads.

The last one is the one that actually had 98xxx yesterday.

BTW, I logged out of the app store and logged back in and I now see 50K+ and not 50,000

jim_m_58 said:

BTW, I logged out of the app store and logged back in and I now see 50K+ and not 50,000

Yeah I think what happened is that there have obviously been at least two changes:

- backend: downloadCount is rounded to nearest power of 10 (or 5 * power of 10) (e.g. 1000, 50000)

- frontend: download number is abbreviated (e.g. 1K, 50K)

So you saw the effect of the new backend (rounding downloadCount), but you didn't receive the new frontend (javascript) code (abbreviating download count numbers) until you logged back in.

So I take back what I said about A/B testing, your experience was probably just probably just a case of needing to refresh the website.

It is very interesting to me that they felt they need to round the numbers on the backend.

I honestly don't remember whether Connect IQ app used to round app download numbers like this (to the nearest power of 10 or 5 * power of 10) (*). Pretty sure they always abbreviated them (at least as long as I can remember), so it's possible that in the past, the CIQ app would've shown 98K for your app, but now it shows 50K.

It could just be that rounding the numbers on the backend was the easiest way to round them for both the website and the app, as the app would presumably not need to change.)

(*) Edit yeah, this change is new for both the app and the website. Here's a screenshot of of the CIQ app showing "518K" downloads for an app:

Yesterday they didn't round on the website and showed the actual number.

First thing this morning, they did not round either.  

jim_m_58 said:

Yesterday they didn't round on the website and showed the actual number.

Yeah I realize that (I created this thread after all). I was referring to the app (on iOS and Android phones) and its previous behavior, and speculating on why the numbers were rounded on the backend as opposed to doing the rounding on the frontend. I concluded that it was easier to do it that way, as opposed to changing both the website and the store.

My point is that the app used to round/abbreviate the download numbers *somewhat*. e.g. 98,123 would've been rounded/abbreviated to 98K, while the website would've shown the exact number (98,123).

But now with the latest change, both the website and the app do this extreme rounding (98,123 => 50,000) and they both abbreviate the numbers (50,000 => "50k" or "50k+").

So clearly this was accomplished by:

- changing the backend to do the extreme rounding (98,123 => 50,000), so both the website and the app would be affected equally

- changing the website frontend to to do the abbreviation (50,000 => 50K+)

- no change to the app frontend necessary

And again, review numbers in the app are rounded/abbreviated "as necessary", meaning that small numbers like 47 aren't rounded/abbreviated, but big numbers like 10K are. It seems that the website still shows the exact number of app reviews regardless of how big it is.