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CONNECT IQ STORE: display the number of downloads not rounded

dfaina
29 days ago

Good morning.
It should be possible, at least for those who log in as developers, to see the real value of downloads and not the rounded one.
For us it is important to know how many downloads are made, maybe after an update.
For example now it goes from 100k to 500k and
400k downloads of difference are a lot.
In this way it is no longer possible to understand if the work we do is appreciated or not.
Even the statistics section does not help since it was changed.
I hope that my suggestion will be taken into consideration and I think that there are other developers who are happy to be able to review the exact data.

  • 1 day ago in reply to dfaina

    That's true. The download number not linked to revenue since everytime a person updates the watch they download it. So you could have 100 buyers, but update 10 times and have 1000 downloads. Also you could offer the watch for free, get 1,000 downloads and then slap a paid amount on after, and it appears you sold 1,000 , but those users have the free version. 

  • 1 day ago in reply to eau_de_vie

    They totally showed the number in the past. I've been a user for years. 

  • 1 day ago in reply to VirtualStar
    VirtualStar said:
    The fact that it goes 1, 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 , 500,000 , 1 million is the weirdest choice ever. 

    It doesn't actually go that way. I posted it here - I have a watch face that shows up as "100+", but the numbers on the Statistics page don't work for any download count below 1000.

  • 1 day ago in reply to VirtualStar
    VirtualStar said:
    The download number not linked to revenue since everytime a person updates the watch they download it.

    I'm pretty sure the original unobscured "main" download number (the one that everyone sees on the app page) referred to installs alone, not installs and updates. This was very easy to see in the past (years ago) because on the website:

    - the main download number was not rounded at all (unlike the CIQ app, which always "gently" rounded - not obscured - the download number and the review count: e.g. 123,456 => 123.4K)

    - the website app stats tab (only available to the developer of an app) would show a graph of number of downloads over time, which would spike whenever you released an update, which indicated that this metric included updates. However, the main download number would not spike when you released an update, indicating that it did not include updates. Ofc this graph went away a long time ago - it was replaced by per-version and per-device stats.

    I think the new download number is the same as the old number, except obscured (e.g. "severely" rounded to the nearest 1, 5, 10, 50, ..., 50K, 100K, etc.) So I think the main download number is linked to revenue (as well as Garmin's cut.)

    Again, I don't think the reason that Garmin did this is too hard to figure out. Just look at how the Google Play store does the exact same thing (right down to the "+" at the end of the number to indicate it's not accurate), and how the Apple store doesn't even show downloads/installs, only rankings. It can't be a coincidence that this change happened at exactly the same time that CIQ monetization was announced. And again, it's notable that review counts aren't "severely" rounded in the same way as the download count. In the CIQ app, they're just "gently" rounded in the same way they always were, and the same way the download count used to be. In the website, the review counts aren't rounded at all. So any argument about being motivated by cosmetics doesn't ring true to me.

    But clearly there's no good reason Garmin should hide the exact numbers from app devs (except that it's additional work for them to expose that information only to devs.)

    To be clear:

    - by "gentle" rounding I mean the kind of rounding that the CIQ app always did for the download count and still does for the review count. e.g. 123,456 => 123.4K, 900,123 => 900.1K. This is likely done for cosmetic reasons.

    - by "severe" rounding / obscuring, I mean the new kind of rounding for the download count (on both the CIQ app and the website). e.g. 123,456 => 100K+, 900,123 => 500K+. This is arguably done for commercial reasons (to avoid exposing revenue numbers)