Anyone got the google support email address?
I was releasing an app every month and i have done this for over a year. My apps are for thailand specific. educational. My apps have thai language in the app so thai’s can actually read the instructions etc. not many other apps do this. Now, when thai people search in their own language they seem to get apps in english, not Thai - they are useless. Google have stuffed it up!
I think they have definitely changed the weighting of the name for rankings.
HAHAHAHAHA… you must be new here ? 
i dont agree with it. I believe what has happened is whenever we click a app there is section called similar apps in google play. Looks like they changed something there which is causing the decrease in downloads. Now i see that for paid apps if you look at similar apps section its showing paid apps at the top even though they are not so relevant. Previosuly for a paid app it used to show free apps or paid apps depending on the relevance…
i think google is giving more priority to paid apps. May be releasing a paid app might tell us more…
The only way of contacting them would be to fill out one of their stupid, pre-filled forms, which are hard to find too.
Hmm it seems this is the change they’ve made. Frankly I don’t understand it because their model was always based on advertising. They just f… us good as the loss in downloads by 50% is quite significant…
It is easy to understand… I imagine this is what happened inside Google HQ:
Google Exec: we want more money !
Google Product Manger (PM): lets reduce what we pay devs for Admob ads
Google Exec: AWESOME! Do it!!!
(sometime later)
Google Exec: Nobody is using Admob… wtf ? WE NEED MORE MONEY !!!
Google PM: Well, that’s because we reduced the amount of money we pay to Admob … so nobody uses it any more.
Google Exec: Give me solutions, not problem!
Google PM: People only look at the top apps in the lists. So lets re-prioritize the app lists so we show paid apps at the top!
<insert your guess as to what the effect of this will be>
I think it looked more like…
- Nobody’s (marginal amount) buying paid apps/games on our store!
- What can we do about it?
- Let prioritize those apps/games higher in some rankings, then there’ll be bigger chance of grabbing some paid-app income
… which probably doesn’t make sense as most of the Google’s customers got accustomed having everything for free (gmail, youtube etc). But maybe they’re changing their sails and as the next stop we’ll see paid youtube content and a gmail account… ;]
Now i see that even for free apps they are showing paid games on top. crazy!! Some of the games are not even related. They just belong to same category…i think paid apps are the way to go…Any ideas how to promote a paid app?
Get reviews done by trusted Android review sites (give them it for free to review of course).
Offer Lite/Trial/limited time Full version alongside it.
Run an ad campaign to the free version above^.
Get it featured on those Facebook pages with Android followers.
Run house ads too.
What do you say about this?
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/known-issues/24493?hl=en&rd=3
The last one in ‘Recent Fixes’
Hmm… I’ve checked this couple days ago and they didn’t state that. Interesting… Still it means they’ve fix it (Recent Fixes) and there is no change in the traffic.
Not sure if people are still seeing these effects, but I was just checking over my app’s recent performances and one of them is now on 5x the downloads it had been on for several months. It was getting approx 200 a day and now averages about 1k a day. Looked into the data and this started happening from November 5th, which is the day after a lot of you reported a drop. The app gained and gained and is still gaining downloads per day, without any updates or changes from me. Google has definitely re-shuffled things. What I don’t understand is why it would favour an app I made many months ago.
I can also see the same trend in a few of my smaller apps, but on a much smaller scale, like 1.5x-2x.
What kind/type of an app is it?
The app that’s grown a lot is an audio based app, but there are a lot of other types of it available than mine. It’s got no trend elements in it or anything.
And it just shoot up 5x for no apparent reason… weird, but it just proves that they’re messing sth up with their search engine
So there are some winners and some losers in the zero-sum game - i.e. as expected if some apps are seeing decline (if it is not seasonal) - then some others maybe seeing improvement.
Maybe the changes are designed to “share the wealth” beyond the bigger apps - wonder what the graphs look like for Candy Crush etc. or some middle-ground apps in terms of popularity.
Have you been able to identify what were the distinctive features of the apps which were stagnant before but are now balooning - did they have some advantage - for example better ratings or uninstall/install ratios ?
One feature you did mention - they had very low frequency of updates (!) - though that would be surprising if that was relevant (?)
It was gradual. Here’s a screen shot:
I’m sure Google wouldn’t be penalizing their biggest apps and games, but if they were I doubt we’d find out about it from those big publishers.
My smaller apps that have seen small, but sure growth are a simple utility app and a novelty app.
Both a probably mid range in compared to their competition and have solid ratings (3.9 and 4.7), but have very poor user retention (about 5%).
Both were updated in late September (3rd party stuff is all).
1.5x-2xish overall increase so far in daily downloads.
My now bigger app (I shared a screenshot in the previous post) is an audio based app that has good value to the user.
It probably sits in the upper end compared to it’s competition and has a rating of 4 stars with about 25% user retention.
It was also updated in September and just for 3rd party stuff.
About 5x increase in daily downloads so far.
Maybe they’ve started favourising some nationalities (some unknown political reasons)? What country are you from A1ka1inE?