It’s over a week now since I uploaded the finished version of Tap That! Number to the Android Market. Some people have been asking how the app is going now, so I thought I’d share with you some statistics and figures from the past week or so.
When I first released the app, it was only an alpha “test” version. I uploaded it to the Market purely as an experiment, to gauge interest. I noted in the description that it was not yet playable, and only for testing. However, the demo app still received just over 100 downloads in the first few days. I was quite surprised that so many people would download a test version of the app. How many more would be interested in the real thing?
![First day on the Android Market Android Market statistics for first day](http://s10736.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/market-stats-day-1-300x128.png)
About 4 days later, I published the first full version of Tap That! Number. This version was completely playable, and included a proper description for the Market. This time the Developer Console took a while to update download figures, so I turned to my AdMob reports to indicate whether there was any change in the number of active users.
![AdMob stats for Week One](http://s10736.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/admob-stats-week-one-300x94.png)
As you can see from the graph above, there was a significant spike in user engagement on the day the new version was released. However, this quickly dropped off, until after a few days I was getting a very modest 20-30 impressions per day. Taking a look at the Android Market stats tells the other half of the story – a total count of 178 installs, with only 43% of those active installs. This means an increase of only 70 users after uploading the finished app, compared to the 100 users who downloaded the demo version on the first day.
![Android Market Developer Console Android Market developer console with one app](http://s10736.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/android-market-developer-console-178-300x104.png)
So the initial figures are out – 178 installs, 78 active users and several hundred ad impressions. The biggest lesson I’ve learned from this first week – don’t upload your app to the Android Market until it’s ready for public use. I probably drove away several potential users who downloaded the demo version and uninstalled after finding it unplayable. If I’d waited and released a complete app from day one, I could have boosted engagement levels significantly.
Things are beginning to move faster though, especially in the past few days. Earlier this month I reached $1 total earnings from AdMob (only $999 to go!), and just released an updated version which includes tactile feedback when a tile is pressed. I’ve got some particularly exciting news regarding this first update – but that’s best kept for another post! 🙂 For now, you can download the app and tell me what you think.