My app's download in google play reduced 30%-50% from August 10th

Hi All,

My apps’ download in google play reduced 30%-50% from August 10th. I have dozens of app, they are all going down. I don’t know why. Does anyone have the same issue?

Me too. Maybe it’s the holidays. I’m waiting to the 1st of September, I hope that the numbers go up again until christmas.

Doesn’t seems so, it’s been mentioned and discussed here already: Huge downloads drop - Income Reports - Making Money with Android. I’ve noticed this as well: at first 40% drop, then after a week or so recovery, but around August 20th things changed dramatically - I’m seeing significant increase in downloads from tier 1 countries (I’m talking almost three times the number of last few months downloads).
Since this is not isolated incident I think it’s safe to assume that it’s effect of Play positioning and/or end user experience tweaks by Google (my guess is that we are seeing effect of incoming changes to Play categories: Introducing new app categories | Android Developers Blog).

Thanks for give me the link of another post. Unfortunately my apps has not recovered yet, and I have to wait and see…

You really should not expect that, I mean, it coud happen but it might as well be permanent change. For example when Google introduced ‘Designed for Families’ program a lot of apps where hit because cross-sell lists are separated between ‘Family’ categories and other apps, so if app enjoyed sizable number of downloads via cross-sell against apps that opted for ‘Designed for Families’ badge this source of promotion’d run dry overnight.

I also noticed that ‘Designed for Families’ could make impact on my downloads, and I have change one of my app to ‘Designed for Families’ and nothing good happens…
I know the change could be permanent change, but the download of the developer of the post of Huge downloads drop has recovered, so I wish my download can be recovered too, if it don’t happen, I also have to accept that. That’s sad but have to…

Do you try to do campaigns to promote? There are a lot of options to promote your app.

Without at least ten gran (in fact I’d say 5 times more but I guess with niche app and a lot of work you could probably make a dent with just 10k) there’s really not much you can do with average quality app. You can get incentivized downloads but they are crap, if you want to have decent install rate from tier 1 you’ll have pay around $.2-$.3 and getting such high ARPU is impossible with crappy retention and engagement from incentivized users (even with high quality app). Non-incentivized users are better but you’'ll pay much more per download (I ended up with CPI between $0.6 and $1 in tier 1, good luck getting such high ARPU). So if you don’t want to end with negative ROI you’ll have to gain enough traction to grow organic downloads and with ten gran you can get 25k downloads at most which’ll hardly make a difference when spread around several countries.

I’ve spent 9k on mix of incentivized and non-incentivized installs over a period of two weeks and ended with -50% ROI (daily downloads went up around 15% but at the same time I’ve been promoting my app quite intensively via social media so only part of this growth can be attributed to advertising campaign). Anyway it’s your money, so hey, good luck if you wish to try.

No, I have not used any campaigns, and I don’t know which one is good to spend.

Yes, I heard a lot about spending money on buying installs is wasting money. So far, I still leverage cross promotion on my apps.

To me it was a good marketing. I doesn’t waste money. Just you need to do with head. There are some techniques to do good campaigns.

Just out of curiosity, how much did you spent and what was your ROI?

I have also seen a pretty big decrease of installs on my games since 1st of september, i think it may be related with the fact that 1st of september is first day of school in many countries and my games appeal mainly to children, but i dont know.
People who had games on the play store for many years, do you have a drop in installs on 1st of september?

Maybe it’s the reason, but I think that the eCPM that you will receive this month could be higher. More advertisers.