Falling into and out of favor with Google Play’s Algorithm
Around May this last year, Unciv — the open-source app I’m developing — inexplicably started getting huge amounts of downloads, around 5 times as much as the previous month.
Digging into it then, we concluded that the Gods of the Algorithm decided to smile upon us — and now that we’re out of the sunshine, we can tell the full story. Since ours is a relatively simple case —with no marketing, no ads, and no other sources that could claim to be ‘pulling users’ — we hope this will be of use to others to judge this effect in a semi-sterile environment.
This is a graph of our user acquisition during the past year. Our downloads went from ~600 new users per day pre-Algo to an average of ~3,000:
Looking at the drilldown, it’s clear that this comes from referrals inside Google Play, and not from user searches — which remain pretty consistent at ~700 downloads a day
Now that we’re several months after the explosion, we can judge that the effect was a large increase in daily active users — from 8,500 to 12,000 — and correspondingly monthly active users, and this number seems to have become relatively stable. Those users who were uninterested bounced off, those who wanted more stayed, and although the number of players is still going down it’s tapering off to stability.
Do I have a “big point” to end with? Not really. This was a stroke of luck, and this post is only here to preserve this data for someone who may find it useful.
