Google is always changing their alrorithms it seems. We also tried to optimize keywords to fight against this, but it’s useless. Android is like gambling and you shouldn’t rely on it as your main income source any longer. Create a new plan, change something about what you present and how you present it. One option for example is to create bigger games/apps with more quality than before and focus on iOS instead of Android. Usually we earned only a bit less on Android instead of IOS, but now it’s become ridiculous. We need 10 times more downloads on Android for the same income we need on iOS and we don’t even get those downloads anymore. We don’t even have this 30 days boost anymore after release we always had before. Something really is broken. Well, as I said. It probably won’t get better for us and we shouldn’t just wait for it.
Not sure what is going on there guys, but my apps are doing fine. Even better than before it seems. I dont try new niches or categories though, maybe thats why I have success. I stick to one category of apps and cross-promote all the apps in that niche.
my apps dont have daily engagement like games or social/chat apps, but I think google is moving towards ranking apps based on retention and active installs more. Also looks like if you update your app regularly, you will benefit, but I dont have any data to back that up, I dont update the apps regularly because its a tedious task.
Sure, there always must be some developers who are lucky or just get what they deserve. On the other hand I also still see a lot of low quality apps in the top charts and quality apps fail without any reason. Good icon, good screenshots, good aso, good rating. They still failed. Others, the complete opposite visible in the top charts.
Did you guys check your sudden download drops by country? We for example got a sudden decrease from 500 downloads a day from brazil to 30 a day. While downloads increased in Thailand from 5 to 100 downloads a day at the same time. Some others kept completely the same amount.
Android Has 6x Market Share compared to iOS. (80+ vs 13%).
FYI: CPI Rates in US on Android vs is iOS are not that different. Its just that Android has Market share in cheaper countries too (where iOS has no marketshare and hence have better average rates worldwide).
Are you sure about 30 day change? I believe 30 day effect still exist?
Yeah, for the last 3 games downloads were the same from day one to day 90. It never went up.
About iOS I can only say what I’ve experienced. We have one game that earns $200 a month with only 25 downloads a day from ads. There are many factors summing up. 2 times longer session times on iOS, 3 times more ad impressions per user. 3x more ecpm. Users are mainly from europe and asia, only 15% US. We’ve also seen some advertisers paying between 12-18$ for a single install on iOS.
Hi!
I publish my first game in Google Play 5 days ago and i have zero downloads. Do you have any idea how log will take to get some downloads from users?
Is a truck and car parking games in Unity with awesome 3d graphics and cars. Is a quality game and i don’t know why don’'t show in GP search. Maybe is earlier.
From your experience how long will take until i will get some downloads 
Thanks!
From my experience the first week shows what kind of potential your app or game might have. If you have very few downloads then probably it’s not going to get massively better later on.
The problem for new games is visibility in Google Play store. In order to get downloads your game has to be visible in the store. Basically your game should have a high rank in some top list or alternatively high rank for certain keywords which are often searched for. Ranks are mostly based on the number of downloads and since new games do not have much downloads it won’t rank high anywhere and thus don’t get new users.
A good marketing plan can provide some initial boost which might help to get the ball rolling. However it won’t be easy because the competition is very high and you will need decent amounts of downloads to have any chance at all.
I have several apps that was being downloaded 200+ times a day, now they are being downloaded 10-20 times a in a day. I am seriously in a trouble, I have given mail to the google and they said the same thing that my download and app launches have decreased but I did no changes in the mean time.
What kind of apps did you make? Is there for example a clone app in your list? With clone app I mean an app that is certainly heavily inspired by another popular app with an ASO text that is clearly optimized to match and get linked to this popular app. If yes, your account might be listed as a spam account now and your apps don’t appear anymore in the similar apps lists.
the existing apps are ok and not a clone of anything but yes I have some suspended app in my account, is that any matter?
It might be. We also got a 7 day violation notification because of keyword spam once. From then on every app flopped with 1000-5000 downloads, even though our first app with this account got more than 100k downloads. Also we never got the first 30 day effect again since then, even though our apps showed potential with 25 downloads already on release day, which usually goes up to around 500 a day on day 30. That’s why I am starting to think our account is doomed till the end of time because we are listed as “bad developers” now.
Can you describe it a bit more?
Just opened a thread about this thing.
http://forums.makingmoneywithandroid.com/marketing-methods/18384-similar-apps-listing.html
It seems that google decided to kill all my apps now…went from 900 daily downloads just 3 days ago (with one game entering the top500 in racing category in 12 nations) to 30 today…never had so few downloads since i started 6 months ago with a single game…now with 5 games all of a sudden no one download any of them anymore, when 3 days ago i was rising up in the charts…
This is scary. Hope u will get back on track
Is the racing game a very simple/short game where players just play and leave?
As far as I know it’s still not clear if the ratio between installs/deinstalls really has an impact to ranking and downloads. Playtime and amount of bootups though don’t have an impact at all to rankings and this good and fair in my opinion, because every app has a different kind of use.
By the way, for searching about the 7 day violation notification and app suspension I found some people claiming that they’ve seen download drops, because all their apps disappeared from the similar apps lists. After some research I found out that our apps also disappeared from those lists after we got this notification. Google definetly puts a filter at shady developers, thats for sure.
@StevePof I agree there with u. Last time google updated the developer policies, there was a mention of developer score which determines the visibility of apps by a developer. If i was google, i will decrease developer score for publishing too many apps quickly, getting 7 day notifications.
it is a game where you can unlock cars and powerups, new tracks and so on…the mean session duration is about 5-6 mins (a pair of completed races roughly)…but the problem is that the user behaviour has not changed since its launch. I always had sessions of around 5 mins, with a 10-15% of the user base playing on top of the new downloads everyday.
The app had steadily growing daily donwloads since its launch, starting from 40ish and growing up to 100ish at the end of the first month…then a few days after the end of the first month, i had that huge spike going up to 900 daily donwloads for 3 days, i entered the top500 racing (not new racing, nor new games…the “real” racing charts) in 12 nations and then, 2 days later…booom…no one downloads it anymore and, no one even download my other apps (which were doing 20-50 daily downloads steadily since months)…yesterday i had 60 daily download summing ALL the apps…
Btw, in these same days, the facebook page of the same racing game, is being liked and shared by a lot of people (600+ shares and 20+ likes in this last week…compared to 0 in the month before)…yet, all my games are suddenly dead.
Okay. Sorry to hear that. Honestly I have one game also like that. It has been dead now. Last time I do promote a lot but no matter how much I promote it, downloads keep falling also. It is still in my mystery. After that, I publish a new app in my usual niche category. So far it is doing okay and it almost reach the peak now where I see straight line in the active users chart. Last time use to gain more than 50% of users but now gaining less than 20% from daily downloads.
Your other apps also in the similar racing niche?