Hello,
It appears reason for drop in downloads in new playstore UI: https://www.theandroidsoul.com/google-is-testing-new-search-ui-on-the-play-store/
Good researching! That has to be the reason, or at least that Google is testing that new UI and has also rolled out other Play Store related changes.
Interesting to see if this turns out to be the cause. None of my test devices yet have this new Play Store available so what’s going to happen when they start full roll-out?
I saw this on my phone some time ago…
So it’s the end for smaller devs, whose apps are not first on the search list…
Its not just about being first because, first and second are also ads for any popular search terms.
The only way to make money would be if your app can derive more value than you pay to google for downloads. i.e mostly big companies.
Interesting.
As @A1ka1inE says, this has to be combined with other changes too because it cannot explain alone such big drop (60-70%) or big grow (50-60%) for my apps. Maybe the algorithm that suggests apps to users also changed. For example, I have those two apps that are first results for their respective niches but one of them dropped downloads by 70% while the other increased by 50-60%. Anyway if these changes are implemented for all devices I alredy see some good oportunity to take advantage of this new design.
I started seeing this search result 2 months ago. But it appears only for the top most search result. Other search results appears in the same way as it was earlier.
May be their beta testing has such experiements and stages.
Slowly they will replace old UI with this latest one.
It might be the good opertunity for topmost apps in the search results.
f u c k google