Can I loose/decrease in users if I request Internet access just for analytics?

Hi,

I did a Rubik’s cube app just for fun. I currently have ~200 users and the number of daily installs seems to be steadily increasing.

I don’t expect a money from this app, but the learning experience has been awesome (not to mention with feeling of self worth you get by having people enjoying your work)

Since I’ve added different levels I wanted measure how long do people take to finish each level and on a later version give it 1, 2 or 3 stars according to how fast they were compared to the average.

The thing is that for that I will need to request INTERNET access without immediately giving anything in return. My question is, can this have a detrimental effect on the users? Will users not suspect the upgrade when they are informed that now it requires internet, and how about new users?

I know its just a small app, but I wanted to do this right. Your comments are welcome.

Hi feiteira,
I think add that permission normally is not a problem but in your case could be.
Why don’t you add a leaderboard?
You can use Scoreloop and give something back to the users. :slight_smile:

I don’t think you are going to lose users. Most (90%+) users install anything and don’t care about permissions. Just put some text saying that you are going to use Google Analytics in the description of your application. In fact it seems to be required by Google.

Silly poll. Will you lose users ? Yes! How many? ← real question.

Answer: not enough to care about it. Go add it. And while you are in there, integrate ACRA for crash logging :slight_smile:

Hi all,

thanks for your comments.

In the end I added scoreloop for the leaderboards and the Analytics.

I must say that I’m not totaly satisfied with scoreloop, I used the demo UI they provide and sometimes it hangs forever trying to connect. Still, it does the trick.

From my side, my app was going great and yesterday when I got 3x 1 Star in a row :frowning:

I will add something asking only users to rate.
My idea, is that after you’ve played the app for a while a new button shows up saying “Rate this app” that goes to Google Play. This “new” button will remain there forever. What do you think?

Btw, I’ve finished my initial 30 days on Google Play today, so let’s see how things go from now on…

Hi feiteira,
I’m happy you choose to give to the users something back.
I’m having the same issue with scoreloop but I can’t solve because it seems a problem with their servers. At the moment it doesn’t exist a real alternative and I stick with that for now.
Don’t worry for 1 stars rate: if they are just rate without any comment they are meanless and I think you shouldn’t care of them.
You need to care of low rate with comment that make sense like the game crash or this is not working or miss this feature.
In my game I show the rate button everytime the user complete the puzzle and I think it’s the right approach because sometime the users are in rush and don’t have time to rate. :slight_smile:
About the 30 days I think it depends on the game but normally unless the game became very popular and it’s in top 50 free games the downloads decrease alot (my game goes from 150-200 per day to 20-30 per day).
I think the only real possibility to increase the downloads is to keep updating the game and publish a new game with a button to download the other game (cross promoting).
You can get other 30 days of downloads and share them with the previous game :slight_smile:
Warning : Don’t rush to publish new game without care of quality because that can hurt downloads alot :slight_smile: