Acknowledged
5 months ago

App Downloads: Please show a more exact number of app downloads in the CIQ store

I have recently made my own watch face and uploaded it to the Connect IQ store, however, it is very difficult (and a little frustrating) as a developer to not be able to see the amount of downloads I have. For a number of days, all I knew about my watch face's progress was that it had "100+" downloads. Then when I checked yesterday, I saw that it was finally "1K+". But that's all we as developers see. A developer who has "100K+" won't know how many downloads they have until they reach "500K+" - and that is a very massive gap that could take months before the developer really finds out a better approximation of how many downloads they have.

I have really enjoyed being able to make this watch face and I am very thankful that Garmin has provided means for independent developers to do so, but it is very difficult to gauge what audiences want if we don't know anywhere near how many people are actually interested in the product. Even just showing "1.2K" or "534K" is better than having to wait tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of downloads (and many months later) before knowing how many downloads we have.

Please consider adding this feature as it would really make marketing a little easier for independent developers. Thank you!

singularity
Parents
  • 5 months ago

    To be clear:

    - in the past (before monetization), both review numbers and downloads were "gently" rounded in the Connect IQ store app. But this "gentle" rounding was more like the examples of 1.2K and 534K (rounding to a handful of significant figures / decimal places, so that the approximate number is still known). In the Connect IQ store website, review numbers and downloads were displayed without any rounding. It's fairly likely the "gentle" rounding was done for cosmetic purposes.

    - when (built-in) monetization was announced, download counts were suddenly "severely" rounded (or obfuscated) for both the app and the website. By "severe" rounding / obfuscation, I mean rounding to the the nearest power of 10 or 5 * power of 10 (e.g. 1+, 5+, 10+, ..., 5K+, 10K+, ..., 100K+, 500K+), so that you don't really have an approximate number, only an estimate to within a half order of magnitude. 

    If you look at the API network request which loads when you open an app on the store website, the download count is already obfuscated in the response (meaning it's more than a cosmetic change.)

    This "severe" rounding / obfuscation seems to be done to avoid exposing revenue numbers to end users. I think it's this is a safe assumption to make because the "severe" rounding happened at the exact same time monetization was announced, and it also matches exactly what's done in the google play store (which also displays "severely" rounded or obfuscated numbers like 100K+ and 500K+). I think it's no coincidence that Garmin copied the "+" suffix that's also used in the google play store (which drives home the point that this is an estimate). It's also worth noting that that Apple app store does not display download numbers at all, only the approximate number of ratings and the download rank in the app's category.

    Having said all of that, I don't see any reason that developers shouldn't have access to their own exact download counts.

    If the rationale for obscuring download counts is truly to avoid exposing revenue numbers to end users, then there should be zero issues exposing exact download counts to developers for their own apps.

Comment
  • 5 months ago

    To be clear:

    - in the past (before monetization), both review numbers and downloads were "gently" rounded in the Connect IQ store app. But this "gentle" rounding was more like the examples of 1.2K and 534K (rounding to a handful of significant figures / decimal places, so that the approximate number is still known). In the Connect IQ store website, review numbers and downloads were displayed without any rounding. It's fairly likely the "gentle" rounding was done for cosmetic purposes.

    - when (built-in) monetization was announced, download counts were suddenly "severely" rounded (or obfuscated) for both the app and the website. By "severe" rounding / obfuscation, I mean rounding to the the nearest power of 10 or 5 * power of 10 (e.g. 1+, 5+, 10+, ..., 5K+, 10K+, ..., 100K+, 500K+), so that you don't really have an approximate number, only an estimate to within a half order of magnitude. 

    If you look at the API network request which loads when you open an app on the store website, the download count is already obfuscated in the response (meaning it's more than a cosmetic change.)

    This "severe" rounding / obfuscation seems to be done to avoid exposing revenue numbers to end users. I think it's this is a safe assumption to make because the "severe" rounding happened at the exact same time monetization was announced, and it also matches exactly what's done in the google play store (which also displays "severely" rounded or obfuscated numbers like 100K+ and 500K+). I think it's no coincidence that Garmin copied the "+" suffix that's also used in the google play store (which drives home the point that this is an estimate). It's also worth noting that that Apple app store does not display download numbers at all, only the approximate number of ratings and the download rank in the app's category.

    Having said all of that, I don't see any reason that developers shouldn't have access to their own exact download counts.

    If the rationale for obscuring download counts is truly to avoid exposing revenue numbers to end users, then there should be zero issues exposing exact download counts to developers for their own apps.

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