Huge Drop in Downloads since Friday (02/23)

Any one notice huge sudden drop in downloads since yesterday (02/23). Seems like some apps downloads reduced by 50%.

Yes, for some of my apps the drop was more like 80%. Any ideas what’s going on? Algorithm change? :frowning:

I had the same, from yesterday installations dropped about 40%

Yes, happened to me as well, but on 8 February.

Also, there is a thread with same problem - http://forums.makingmoneywithandroid.com/advertising-networks/55309-sudden-significant-drop-admob-impression-few-days.html

Usually when algorithm changes happen, some apps get more downloads and some apps get less downloads.
It appears there is only drop for some apps yesterday. It almost looked like either:

  1. Download of all apps in certain categories dropped.
  2. Google punishing some developers.

Not sure which one.

I don’t see any significant drops in keyword rankings or in overall visibility so it’s a bit of a mystery how this happened…

Yes this drop seems quite weird.

Either Google is taking steps against Indie Devs even further, or there’s problems with the Play Servers?

Did you notice a significant drop too?

Hi,
I noticed a huge drop in downloads too! One of my game was getting 3k downloads daily.
On 23rd Feb, it dropped to 2k downloads.
And it dropped further to 1k yesterday.
Today is even worst, it only drives 500 downloads.
Is it true that once the downloads dropped, it will be very difficult for it to increase again?

I had significant drop around 14-15 Feb, ~60% initially but after day or so Google Play rolled back stats for this period and new one were published. Even with corrected stats I still had 30% drop but since then not only downloads recovered but judging by today numbers it seems I’ll have downloads comparable to Christmas.

My daily app download went off too by 40-50% suddenly without any clear reason. Asked google and they say that it is probably related to google play search or featured apps algorithm change. Feel a little bit upset though as it affected my daily admob revenue pretty significantly and I cannot do anything about it as the reason of the sudden significant drop is not quite clear

Yes, I confirm that in one of my apps the downloads went down from 2500/day to 1800, then 1200, then 800 and today 500 :open_mouth: . While two or thre other apps got an increase of 40-70%… Definitely an algorithm change.

Do you know of any differences in games that climbed up versus game that went down?

Same situation with one of my apps,from 23 feb downloads dropped down by 60% :frowning:

Having same problem. I actually thought Appannie reporting (in the emails I receive) messed up, but it was not the problem.
I hope indie devs are not doomed.

Did not notice any major increase or decrease in my app downloads as such.

I have huge download drops that keep getting worse since 2/22. I contacted google support but they just tell me the standard information about how to improve my visibility. It does not explain why the downloads just dropped suddenly across almost all my apps. It must be a algorithm change. Hopefully, the downloads will go back to normal soon as I am losing faith in all app stores.

Hi guys,
Same happened to me. Our app had an average of 40k installs/day for years, and since Feb 23rd it dropped to 8k installs/day - and it’s like that until today.

I spoke to someone at Google Play and he told me the last big change they had was this one in August (and it could be starting now in some categories): https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/08/how-were-helping-people-find-quality.html?m=1

So I looked in my Vitals screen (in the Console) and noticed we are exceeding their ‘Bad behavior threshold’ in all these metrics:

  • Excessive wakeups
  • Excessive network usage (background)
  • ANR Rate
  • Multi-ANR rate
  • Crash rate
  • Multi-crash rate
  • Frozen frames

Would you all mind sharing this data as well? What are you exceeding? I am pretty confident these drops have to to with these, or at least one of these metrics.

Also I noticed some of our other apps are not suffering from this, but they are in different categories (this one is in Arcade games) - so please also share the category of our app for so we can compare this too.

If Google wont tell us exactly what happened, let’s try to find out for ourselves by comparing our apps’ behaviors.

Thanks

My downloads plummeted on the 7th or 8th of Feb. Seems there are 2 main days when it started for different people. On those days and the 23rd.

Looking at my vitals screen the 2 that are above the “bad behavior” threshold are crash rate and multi-crash rate. No others. I’ve been meaning to try to figure out the crashes in my main app but they are difficult to figure out.

Will have to get on that and see if anything improves if it is not too late.