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+)

Anyway it's too bad that downloadCount is rounded on the backend, bc if it wasn't, we could've used that endpoint to get the exact number. It would've been nice if Garmin had added "exactDownloadCount" to that app info api so at least we devs could see the number. Or if they changed the UI (and backend) so we could see it at least for our own apps.

Showing 50k+ instead 89000 is definitely a step forward... Especially for developer... With such a visualization, showing the real number in the e.g. tooltip would say a lot about next generation of round function.

Let's make next step:

- stars - whatever the star means

- label - nothing, a little, average, quite quite, a lot

- 0 or 0+

...

They could use /  like netflix, after it got rid of starred ratings. A few months later, they could add  for when you *really* like an app.

I don't know what to say or think. Either for some strange reason they don't want people to be able to compare apps or someone just thought: "for a long time the store is too stable, people are hardly complaining about the bad search engine any more, let's screw something else"

THe stats tab also seems to have died. All I see is "Sorry, no statistics available yet."

I have not looked at the stats with anything useful since they went to the new format.  About the only thing the new stats provided was which devices were most popular.

I don't see any advantage to this, it's not that they had to save room to show something else....

peterdedecker said:

I don't see any advantage to this, it's not that they had to save room to show something else....

And if space and simplicity were the only concerns, they would've rounded the numbers on the website the same as they'd already done in the app - e.g. 921,123 => 921K, instead of 921,123 => 500K.

It seems that the primary motivation is to make the download count extremely fuzzy, especially considering that the CIQ store app already has rounding/abbreviation, and they probably expect most people to use the app, not the website.

flocsy🤠 said:

Either for some strange reason they don't want people to be able to compare apps

Can it be a sheer coincidence that this change coincides with CIQ monetization?

If I know the exact number of downloads, I know exactly (*) how much money the dev (and Garmin) made off that app. Maybe that's not information they want people to have access to.

(* or close enough to "exact". Yeah there's some uncertainty due to currency differences and fees.)

This also goes back to the decision to round the download count on the backend, so you can't even see the exact number if you look at the app info api response. And if you have an old version of the CIQ store app, the count will still be (extremely) rounded.

Imagine somebody wrote a script to scrape the whole store and collect detailed information about monetized apps, including price and exact download count. That's probably the kind of scenario they're trying to prevent. Whether that kind of information is useful or not is debatable, I guess.

Agree.  This really sucks.  It's an example of fixing something that's not broken and breaking it in the process.

There is a big difference between 900 and 100, between 1000 and 9000, and between 49k and 10k. This makes it very hard, actually a bit impossible to guage the uptake on new apps.   Garmin please UNFIX this.!