Tracking the Market (Google Play)

Hey all! This is a great forum. I used to post occasionally in the android market help forum, until they ran us developers out.

One thing I’d like to do is as a group help track what we think is happening in Google Play. Normally my sales are like clock work, appx 1.5 per hour, on average per day. Every once in a while (once per week?) I will not have any sales for stretches, sometime 10 hours. But then they will pick right back up like clock work.

In fact, it happened last night. Starting around 9pm eastern, then leading into today, very slow sales. I’m not sure exactly what is happening, but I bet it has something to do with the new Play implementation. I noticed the Play link added to the google home page and assumed sales would pick up! But, just the opposite effect? How can that be? Other than other changes happening that we don’t understand.

Are you guys interested in collaborating or checking each others experiences with the market?

It could be helpful to correlate some statistics from several developers, see if peaks & lows are happening at the same time. Unfortunately I don’t have any regular sales on the Android Market - most of my apps are free. Reporting is delayed for free apps, so I can’t really tell if downloads drop off for an hour, or even a whole day.

Thanks for the response David. We had a pretty good network with people letting other devs know when the market was “broken” and other obvious issues with sales. You might be able to notice changes when you don’t have any ad impressions, etc… too
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Hmm… and even though sales are way down, my app rank went up. Go figure? This says to me that all sales must be down relatively.

So after the worst day in a year yesterday (27 March) things seem to be back on track today, like normal. Has anyone else experienced this? Any ideas as to what it could be?