Sudden drop in number of daily installs on Google Play Store

Well so how can it be than an app with a 4.75 rating with 70k ratings, top 2% over all in crash rates monthly updated since 8 years with by far the best ratings of all it's competitor is also affected ?

None of the competitors are visible in the similar apps and it's the same for all of them, we are now fully unrelated and all linked with some other random apps.

 

1. Quality have Nothing to do with the ratings/ recommendations cause they have no idea how to measure Game quality ... that's what the PR department say ... then it's given to the engineers and they have some basic parameters (Like does the game have 10.000.000 installs achieved(in one month) from cross promotion because your company have 1000 games promoting your new stuff?) which obviously can not evaluate a game quality.

2. I'm pretty sure there are also big (by our standards) games / companies affected.

3. And the most important.
Did Google ever admitted that they did something wrong? that some algorithm was an epic failure? Will they ever admit this? even when you present the evidence ...

*ps: the apps shown as Related are not random ... they are chosen by the algorithm by some new top of the notch parameters ... we could go with conspiracy theory and assume that the profit they make for Google is one of the most important factors ... i did not want to say it ... but maybe having adds from another provider than Google adMob like Unity etc etc (which does not generate for them anything is a factor ). But obviously not even this can be taken as a rule because there are games with NO adds which dropped ...
So it's possible that's just a bug ... but i assume they are willing to lose 10% of the stock than admitting that someone f....ked up the algorithm

 

It seems Google's support has put this text on auto-reply:


I agree with the post above that a lot of developers are suffered - both poor-quality apps, and very high-quality! Most of the victims simply read the messages on the forum (I'm one of them), or justify the fall of downloads by some kind of temporary factor.

Maybe there is some kind of platform in which you can collect signatures in order to have a relevant counter? Any suggestions?

P.S. I do not know why, but I remembered this:

 

It's their intentional change which hasn't yet quite work out as they planned for now and is currently in a bugged state. However, if their change wouldn't result in bugs, broken lists, empty pages and a looped More by this dev list - still, we would see our downloads decrease.

Here is a screenshot of their official response:



What's important is their intent. It's not going to change in the near future at least. And it's logical and follows the example of Apple. And we've seen how it played out with Apple. E.g. I got dozens of apps rejected, and dozens removed from the store. I have heard from several developers independently that dealing with Apple has become a nuisance for them. In a call with their representative, the Apple guy hinted that they take former Steam as boutique store as an example. Basically, less trash on the store, more hand-picked stuff. And a proper inventory worthy of people who've bought an expensive, elite device. Well, he didn't say exactly that - I kind of asked him if that's what they want, and he kinda confirmed. You know, an Apple person can't official say such stuff, they need to stay polite and politically correct. By the end of the call, I understood that there is basically nothing I, as a single dev, can offer to their store that they would really want to accept. Or at least it should be a game I spend years on development of (like a Steam-targeted PC game), yet it should monetize on in-apps. But then you need a working monetization model, with a server, in-game economy and live support - basically, a company with employees. Also, as years have proved, this only works for a narrow subset of genres which not every indie likes or respects.

So, now Google is on the same road. I bet that in the first half of 2018 alone they've got 1m (or even more) new apps uploaded. By the end of 2018 it could well be 2m, if not 2.5m new apps. It's like a big "garbage explosion", with thousands of sweatshops and bedroom coders springing up and using the Unity Asset Store to buy cheap templates and publish easy asset flips, multiple studios re-skinning and re-skinning stuff. Multiple studios publishing stuff to quickly sell it on Flippa (check that online auction and what's being sold there to get the idea). Multiple investors buying up garbage en-masse and inserting triple interstitials to force you make an accidental click on the ad. Etc etc.. The same avalanche has hit Steam btw..

Google has hired armies of people to process updates and check new submitted apps. They apparently test the app completely every time you update anything, even just add a space character to the end of the description. Imagine how much it costs to Google to manage a single app on the store. Multiply that by 4-5m (and rising)...

Then someone at Google thought: what do our users really want? Maybe they made surveys, or studied data extensively. The majority of users only need a few of the best apps. After all, they don't have much space on their phone. It's also the mainstream audience, without any diverse tastes. Girls, for example, are a type of audience with very narrow tastes - just Talking Angela and the Barbie app would keep most of them happy. Well, after a while you could add Talking Angela 2 and Barbie 2, and then a few more sequels. Mobile users generally only play games which everyone else plays, in a narrow set of genres/templates. They don't want to learn new rules in new games, and only want stuff which they already know.

Google and 80% of Android users would be just fine if the store had 100 of the best apps.
I know I'm exaggerating, and indeed Google also needs an inflow of new ideas, and new hits, and rotation in the top charts. But the store for a long time used to be a big junk pile - and that's what users have been saying for years. Time for a cleanup. It's also an image problem: Google, a big tech company, doesn't want to be a trash pile.

While the algo is adjusting, some apps will go up, some down - all those on the fringes, feeding small studios and bedroom coders. If some of them will go under or temporarily thrive - Google and especially the majority of users couldn't care less. Our loyalty lasts until the next AdMob paycheck anyway..

Our only hope is that Google somehow reconsiders its intent. It could be (as said) that AdMob revenue drop is too large. Or that they kinda pity the devs and assume that we still aren't that worthless after all.. Might be other considerations, too. Maybe some vocal users will say they won't want Talking Cat Tom (unlikely).

 

Totally agree, Admob is also reviewing the quality of applications directly by humans (I believe).

 

Still no definitive information from Google. After providing evidence to Google support that the "Similar Apps" section is broken (see this previous post), they replied yesterday evening that they're looking into the issue:

Hi Alexandru,

Thanks for bringing your request to my attention.
I want to make sure I get you the best answer possible, and I appreciate your patience while our relevant team looks into your issue. I’ll be sure to reach out to you as soon as I have an update.

Please let me know if you have any questions in the meantime.

Regards,


So, we'll have to wait some more, but at least they didn't gave the template reply with "favoring app quality".

 

The information from google is a copy/paste.

 

Ya it's same in my case from last Saturday 23/06/2018 my daily download ratio fallen down from 1800 to 200.
i don't know what is issue but hear from all devs i realize it's not only problem in my case. my 80% download come from Russia and now today it's totally fallen down i already checked my all keyword but there is nothing change. i hope google will solve it ASAP otherwise i am indie dev and l will lost my stable earning totally, if you guys any update than tell here.

 

I'm close to google, working a lot with them on different subjects but I have the same issue. I had a lot of talks with them this week, but nobody there really knew what was the problem. They indeed noticed that a lot of developpers were loosing installs while other were growing.
All my top games went down except 1, but it's not growing, it is just flat. On this one the overall quality is not as good as the other games (vital, rating, retention...). So quality might no be the real reason of the drop... Maybe it has to do with the history of the game. This game was launch previous our other "successes" and it has over 5M downloads so far. So the historic of this game is "longer" than the others... Anthony is it the same for you ?

Someone at google told me this week they also pay attention of "clones" games. I must admit that a lot of my games are "revamp/reskin" of other more famous games. So maybe they decided to give less visibilities to "clones or me too games". I'm still puzzled on this because i think it is very difficult to find that my games are using a similar gameplay as other games because the arts and universe is fully different... BUT, maybe they screen the user reviews and see people commenting "good game but Rip of Angry Bird" for instance ....
If so, I would rather suggest that Google is flagging some developpers as cloners and decrease their visibility...

However, it does not explain why the similar app section looks weird with unsimilar app that are pushed...

 

Kinda. This is my first answer from them in a pretty long conversation, that looks like a copy/paste. But I think they're going to give a more relevant reply later today or maybe in the weekend.

 

Yeah, the older game with far more historical downloads and reviews is the one performing better. But that's a pretty small sample size to draw any conclusions from.

 

looks like many of us are saying that the most recent games are the most affected.

someone at google told me this week that the era of organic trafic on Google Play is ending and that we (as developpers) might not expect to be such succesfull relying only on organic trafic. Does that mean improving the quality, the ARPU, making UA...??? so this really match the current situation.

However the similar app is broken and has to be fixed.
Also, putting what the customer want in front of customer face is Google DNA. I do not really understand why they would change this by limiting the number of adequate product to push to the user.
At last, as someone said above, is Google really willing to kill thousand of developpers with this new algo? you may like or not Google, but I think they are supporting a lot the developper community. i'm not sure their goal is to loose 80% of their developper community....

 

Well, that's key info.. They really said it in those words?

Not sure it's 80%.

Rather, only the top 3-5% or so developers are probably affected. The top 0.1% isn't affected - they're benefiting. The other 90-97% of dev accounts are students, hobbyists and devs who stopped developing apps and still have the accounts/apps - these never generated any noticeable downloads, never were in "Similar Apps" and thus aren't affected.

Basically most people reading this thread are the top 5% devs who make just enough to quit daily jobs but not enough to become a big company. Maybe some small company owners.. You have to be in the top 5% (or even top 1%) to get 5k downloads per day on an app - and that's which apps were participating in the "Similar Apps" recommendation ring and now got scattered by the algo change.

Maybe there will be just further consolidation.. Apps concentrating on huge accounts run by bigger and bigger investment companies. With most unsupported and under-earning apps gradually getting deleted from the store for violating some policies (after policies change but the apps don't, since there is no source code or no programmer around to update them).

 

The problem is the "quality game" google criteria.
If the era of organic traffic on Google Play is ending, only we have the virality or paid marketing.

 

very well said, from my point of view they afford to lose 99% of developers and nothing will change for them (like they did for the web search), i don't know even if anybody would notice it.

From my late analysis of the market:
Quality = 1.000.000 installs in 3 days ... 10.000.000 in 30 days .... take that indies ) why your game is not generating 50.000.000 installs in 3 months , it must be poor quality (and obviously not the fact that you are not a company with thousand of games crosspromoting)

 

Can't say this is a similar apps glitch, I've dropped from 25,000 to 2,000 installs a day. Friday, i dropped to 7,000 then the weekend when i usually spike on installs dropped to 2-3000.

 

80% of "Real developpers", not single dev in a garage or student. they canno't afford to loose the trust of 80% of real developpers that always helm them to improve their product. do not expect the BIG GUYS to help you change/improve your products because they are already big and not not want change/improvment. they want the situtation to stay the same. Only followers (small developpers) give real feedback and real input to make things change. So either google want to stop innovating or either they still need this developper community.
I can completly agree thtat this new algo could make sense in a way or another (despite the similar app problem) BUT I can not believe that google is entending on prupose to cause so much pain on its developers... That is why, for me despite what I said before and what google is saying this week, they will make a move to fix a little bit the problem.
One other guy from Google told me that they need to screw it a little bit. not sur eif this mean they need to fix it or to smooth the cursor... however i'm confident that it will move in our favor, at least a little... but there ero of organic is ending so it might slowly decrease time after time...

 

hi guy , i get last answer from google


Hi developer,

Thank you for your patience while our relevant team worked to resolve your issues.

This email is aimed to help clarify our changes that impacts the recent install decreases.

As part of our continued effort to deliver the best possible Google Play experience, we regularly update the Play Store to help people find and discover safe, high quality, useful, and relevant apps and games.

Over the last year, we’ve been enhancing our search and discovery algorithms to better reflect app quality. Recently, we increased its importance in our recommendations. This results in more high quality titles being surfaced in the Play Store, which has positively impacted the overall user experience and engagement, which in turn helps developers.

We hear the concerns expressed by some developers about these changes, but we believe that focusing on users will encourage a healthier apps and games ecosystem, and create better opportunities for developers. Developers who focus on app quality can see improvements in their user ratings, and ultimately their retention and monetization.

We encourage all developers to review some of the suggestions in this post and on developers.android.com to learn how to improve the overall quality of their apps and games.

Please let us know if you have other questions. We will be happy to help!

Regards,
Luna
Google Play Developer Support

 

I am convinced that they are "cleaning" the store, they will not give much more information.

Now i´m losing >50 total rates in a game, (deleted of statistics in 10 minutes and down).

Clarification: I do not buy any rate or similar (they all are genuines).

 

I'm pretty sure Google is trying something, but there certainly are bug or at least strange things.

Similar apps don't show up when you're logged in, but logging out you can see them (although you can't download anything logged out).
Whole subcategories are empty. No way to find a game, unless you're in one of the Google-authored lists.

My game dropped from 50k installs a day to under 10k, but on the other hand the quality of the users increased a lot.

 

i think good news guys, last 2 days i pay on adwords 5 euro at day , like 130 installs and i see in last 2 days from 500 downloads rise to 983, i will update you guys next days

 

seems it just weekend days

 

So maybe thats why I got this $30 offer from google to advertise my game. I still got time(and need) to improve my game before I accept their offer though...

They are cleaning the store but still letting junks in? I think if they are planning to clean the store then the 1st thing they should do is to filter the game before enter the store

 

"Its the end of the world as we know it" - REM
I've been making mobile games since before smart phones - the business models change, the platforms change, the ad networks change, the search algorithms change, and the app stores change - all the time. In a 'boom' it is good to be the IndieDev able to crank out fun games and get them easily up on the market. In a 'bust' IndieDevs will always suffer the most. For almost a year now I've tracked the market changes specifically to mobile and noticed a downturn in my business - making mobile games for SmallPubs (I bring the design & dev team, they bring the money). I can always tell when a SmallPub will succeed, because they have more money to spend than just R&D - they will buy installs and build player communities. It isn't any different when you are completely Indie and do the R&D, Marketing, and Community building all yourself. It takes more than shipping to succeed. Unfortunately, discovery is always an issue, and now it is a crisis. I don't have a crystal ball - I can't see any pattern that saves mobile IndieDevs. It used to be common sense for IndieDevs to move to the next platform - PC, Console, Mobile, VR, etc. Unfortunately, I don't see any patterns that say you will do better by swapping platforms either.

So - what do you do? Focus on the players you have. Find ways to make them happy, engaged, and keep them in your games. If all you have is 20K players (what I consider the minimum number of players to keep a game viable) - can you be scrappy enough, clever enough, and find ways to make your game their lifestyle. Using Ads, IAP, DLC, and even subscriptions can you make that last 2 or 3 years for your players? Then make sure you do it on every dang platform you can (wide-distribution). For most UnityDevs it isn't that hard - the engine helps a lot - but it can be a steep learning curve for the ones who haven't tried other platforms - and I know it can be expensive too, so do it slowly. This also means your game isn't a clone of anything - it might not even be a familiar genre, it has to have pizazz, JUICE, and novelty to grab at the hearts of your tiny slice of players. BTW - YouTubers and Press who help promote IndieGames are going to have less content to review - but they are always going to judge your product on novelty and attitude (how it will help drive their own numbers) - deliver on that promise.

I hope we all can keep doing what we love to do. I wish all of you he best of luck finding your niche.

 

The best way Google Play and the App Store can get rid of all the low-effort crap flooding the stores is to implement a per title submission fee. I'd like to see it at least around $100. If they want to improve quality, this is a great starting point.

Even better, if developers want to keep their app on the stores, implement a deadline date, say 1 September, and force developers to sign in and pay a per app fee of $25 to keep it on the store, that will quickly purge the store of useless weight and let developers who are serious about maintaining their app or its quality stay on the store.

 

Apple already do this, it's called the apple developer program. I guess you're talking per app rather than per account though.

 

It also doesn't do a goddamn thing, as both Apple and Valve have shown us.

 

It must be hard to achieve what google are trying to achieve, they are essentially trying to make one algorithm to rule them all. But I'd argue that as much as they want to promote apps that don't get uninstalled, there is also value to users who install and uninstall fun little games all the time, like flappy bird, everyone enjoyed it while it lasted. Games are more like music in that way, some artists stick around forever, others are one hit wonders, but come a karaoke night it's always the one hit wonders that get pulled out of the woodwork even though I'd never listen to them everyday.

 

Maybe the one hit wonder will still benefit sheer virality, like back in ye old days when there was no recommend filter. Its' the niche that will suffer.

If lesser but better quality users is the goal, then they want apps to paddle to the long run before picking up. Ie if you can sustain your audience longer, even small, maybe you'll be back in long term in the organic discovery?

That seems to align the revival of animation channel on youtube, which were "evergreen" and has been started picked up again by the algorithm beyond "organic" engagement.

Maybe it's not a fallout of GDPR fall out but a logan paul one ... It's the philosophical battle of what's quality and how to reward it.

 

Ultimately I don’t care how they decide to do it, it’s their platform afterall, but a little more clarity and maybe a heads up would be nice.

 

Agreed. Change is good. Just don't spend a year getting us all to focus on rating and Android vitals then make a change that clearly doesn't corellate with your message. And don't pretend the change is a function of quality rating, engagement and vitals afterwards because even I have enough data to clearly disprove that .

 

And maybe a roll out over several weeks or months to soften the blow, for example, losing 90% of downloads and as consequence revenue is enough to destroy lives. I feel sorry for those that have kids and a mortgage and employees to think about. I'm lucky I don't.

 

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2018/06/improving-discovery-of-quality-apps-and.html?m=1
"games that have high retention rates, low crash rates, low uninstalls, and many other factors, are recommended more often."
What's the difference between "retention rate" and "uninstall rate"?

 

Google console kind of confuses this a bit. Usually retention refers to people actually using an app day after day. Uninstall rate is what you see on the android user acquisition reports 'retained users'. Although I'm unsure if google considers 'retained users' as retention. Remember that google has many apps to consider, an example I heard once was for a tax app, if you only open it once per year or once per quarter to do your tax, that's actually pretty good retention!

It could also be two measures of the similar things, uninstall rate could be percentage of uninstalls vs installs, where retention measures how many days an app remains installed. If two apps both have 100% uninstall rate, but one has retention of 365 days and the other has retention of 0 days, which is better?

Does anyone know how it's officially measured by google?

 

"Retention rate" is the fraction of users who open an app, generally measured over time. What percentage of people who installed it open the app after 24 hours, after 7 days and after 30 days from installing it?

Uninstall rate is exactly what it sounds like.

So you can have a low retention app that doesn't often get uninstalled, or an app that has a high retention rate in the short term and then commonly gets uninstalled.

Edit: That's a general answer, not a Google-specific one.

 

My game has been hit as well. It's a casual title with playing content for a couple of hours. But given my reviews, people love those hours. So I interpret Google's new algorithm to punish these kinds of titles, and encourage us to build apps that last for a lifetime. Sad really, that puts a great limit on our creativity. And as a gamer I prefer a constrant stream of novel, casual titles over playing the same clash of clan clones all the time.

 

No, this is a bug! Anyone can see that the similar apps are broken. You can pretty much open any app in the store and see that it's either completly messed up or just has circular references with a small group of apps(with extremly varying quality).

I will repeat again what google has told us:

Thank you so much for your patience. Our team is still investigating the most efficient and secure way to resolve the issue you reported. I know you're eager to get working and I apologize for the delay.


I've noted your case as impacted by this issue, and I’ll reach out to you the moment we have a solution.


Please let me know if you have any questions in the meantime - I'd be happy to help.

 

What percentage of people who installed it open the app after 24 hours, after 7 days and after 30 days from installing it

This could be the reason why so many apps show notifications asking to open the app. Just as an experiment I set date and time of my smartphone 1 month ahead - and most apps I have installed show a notification. It would be better if this user experience didn't happen.

 

hi, I have the same problem that some of the best applications are about 80% less downloaded from google play. Can someone give me an email where should I report a problem?

 

https://variety.com/2018/gaming/new...op-downloads-on-google-play-store-1202861850/

https://9to5google.com/2018/06/29/google-play-store-bug-android-apps/

Few more articles on it now coming through even gameloft google themselves and EA have been messed up by the bug above.

Im seeing the same game repeated twice in a lot of listings and bringing up "not interested" hides it and then it comes back immediately you load back up.

 

What if the similar filter is not a bug but a features to them? I mean they have basically removed organic discovery from the store. It would highlight how game fares on their own and measure users engagement free from noise.

 

Earlier this week I had a call with a guy from Google Play's mobile app promotion and he kept saying how you shouldn't trust in organic traffic and the key is to develop your game in a way that you can buy a user with $1 and get $1.2 back in revenue. I also showed him the drastic 90% drop and he didn't think it was normal and didn't know why that had happened. I'm just worried for indies, myself included, if they're moving to that direction of making only paid UA viable way to succeed which indies can't afford.

 

Well that only works if you have $50-100k up front to pay for your soft launch. No game is ever going to launch and on day 1 be making $1.2 per user. It takes a long time to A/B test all possible monetisation placements/price points/strategies etc before a game is going to be anywhere near profitable (and many never reach that point) - and that requires a huge up-front investment that only bigger studios with investment money behind them can afford.
It also means that all games will need to be stuffed full of IAPs (and all the design compromises that requires), as no game that monetises solely with adverts will ever make more than $0.1 per user (often more like $0.01, depending on where the users are).
So yeah, if that's the direction they want the play store to be going in, then it's going to put an awful lot of smaller developers out of business, because no-one will ever find their games now.

 

This might be the logic behind the ranking Algorithm:
https://ai.googleblog.com/2016/11/app-discovery-with-google-play-part-1.html
https://ai.googleblog.com/2016/12/app-discovery-with-google-play-part-2.html

here are some quotes:

Machine learning [..] success heavily depends on the number of training examples to learn about a topic. While for some popular topics such as “social networking” we had many labeled apps to learn from, the majority of topics had only a handful of examples.

We built a pipeline to have human raters evaluate the classifier output and fed consensus results back as training data.
Our initial evaluations showed a high level of disagreement amongst the raters.

To an avid sci-fi gamer, similar game recommendations may be of interest, but if a user installs a fitness app, recommending a health recipe app may be more relevant than five more fitness apps.

 

True.
I was working with a currently famous title in store. This game was in soft launch for more than 1.5 years. The only good stat it had is retention. That's why work was continued. All the time a big team was working to improve game monetization and implement more content. It required a lot of investments to polish game for global launch. Only translations to other languages cost tens of thousands. And only with big support(featuring) of Google Play (using deep relations) it became profitable game.

No chances for indies to repeat production in the same way.

 

Apple has the Apple Developer Program, and Google has the Google Play Developer Program, I'm not quite sure I understand your point?

 

Even Google's app developer page is broken on the app store, it's only showing the same 15 of their apps in an endless loop.

The developer pages are totally broken if you have more than 15 games.

How this update got though qa....

 

My point is that you already need to pay a small fee to publish apps.

 

I wouldn't call 30% of your revenue a small fee.

 

This happened to my downloads: