Google play store publishing report of 6 months | Tips for New Developers | The complete story of How I published my first android app in the Google Play store.

Hello reader, 
In this post, I'm going to put forward my experience of how I created an android game and published it in the Google play store. This article is more of a personal experience than being a technical stuff. So let me begin with my story.

I'm basically a tech geek, or more specifically a code geek. I like to code, a lot. But the education system I had, wasn't giving me enough time to work on the things I liked. But somehow I found out some time to work on the things that I wanted to. So I had this wild dream of creating an app that would go live on the Internet and the dream of many people using it. I chose Android platform because I was a bit familiar with Java and XML + Android was open source and my love. So I created some basic experimental stupid useless apps in the beginning. Thanks to YouTube for giving me resources for learning the concepts.

Disclaimer

• This is my personal experience, Not a pure technical article.
• This article's aim is just to give a brief idea to new developers about how the download numbers may depend on certain conditions. 
• I'm not a pro android developer, I'm just a beginner and want to help new developers in knowing how this system actually worked for me. so that they get an idea.

This was how the idea emerged,
One day, I was having a conversation with my friends. They gave me an idea of creating a game based on 'Handcricket' , a crazy game of cricket played with hands, usually in childhood. It's a very interesting game if played with a real person. I thought of implementing that game in Android and releasing in Play store. So I started working on it.

This simple game grabbed me a sum of 41000 downloads over 7 months with a 4.4 star rating in Play store. Thanks to all my friends without whose support, this wouldn't have been possible😊.

Now comes the actual story of development and releasing. Sorry If I have bored you in the above introduction😐.

If you want to take a try at my First game, 'Handcricket Reborn' - Click here. (For Android)

The design phase:
Let me keep this part short.
It was a nice experience designing a game like this. I Used Android Studio IDE of Google INC. to develop my game. All the icons used in the games were designed in Adobe Photoshop 7.0 with raw files extracted from various sites referred from Google. While developing, I actually learned a lot of extra things.That was a nice experience.
Thanks to Nikita churya, for designing an app logo for me. It really suits the app well.

The Release date:
This first app of mine, was first released on May 13, 2016. Exactly 7 Months before This article was written. So this article is basically a report of Play store growth of my app over this 7 months.
No doubt I was furious on it's publication. So Here's the report of 7 months.

The Report:
As soon as my app was published. The first thing I did was obviously share the app's play store link with my friends so that they could play it and I get downloads. This way I was able to gain 100 downloads/day continuously for some 3 days. This took my app to 500 downloads within a week. All of these installation was done by forwarding the app link to my friends.

First three days

After all my friends tried the game, there were no more installation coming in the next few weeks. I thought this is the end of the app downloads and I would get no more downloads. Because game was so basic and simple.

Next 2-3 months

This continued for 2-3 months. Per day there were 10-20 downloads maximum, all from India. I lost hopes in releasing updates. But one day, on September 5,2016, that is 4 months after the release, all of a sudden the game got 394 downloads (in a single day). Obviously I was amazed about this. I still don't know how. May be because of store listings.

Sudden rise after 4 months

This gave me hopes to improve the app. All the Feedback till now, were to release a Bluetooth version of the game so that multiple players could connect and play cricket together. Even I had that plan. But seeing this sudden increase in download number, I thought of releasing an update to tell the users that Developer is still active with this app.

The first update,
This was on September 13 that I released the first update. Download numbers from that day set a new range of 250-500 installs per day.

first update on September 13,2016

I had saw in an online article that releasing Updates will increase the number of downloads (because it would appear in the 'New+Updated Games' Section of play store), which sadly didn't happen for me.
But at this stage, the app still had 4.9 star maintained. So It somehow came up in Play store rankings. It was 173rd rank in Top Free Sport Games in India on September 12.
I got this mail from an App position tracking website App--Tracker,

Email telling the app rank in India (Top Free sport games)

This Surely made me furious which made me work on this game. I released 3-4 updates back to back during the month of October to maintain User satisfaction (Bug less game-play).

Released 3 updates, each removing erros

As I did this, number of downloads gradually still went up. But there was no proper format of growth so that I can explain it here. I'll post the downloads per day graph here so that you get a better idea.

Lifetime: downloads/day (7 months)

As of today, the app is getting 200 downloads per day. Because It's too long that I last maintained it because of my exams and other academic stuff. Currently I'm learning Bluetooth API so that next update to my game gets something new and crazy.

So this was my experience after I uploaded my first app. It was actually a dream come true moment for me. Thanks for reading with patience. Now have a look at some observations I made and some tips based on the same.

Things that I observed in this duration.

1. The Android version which gave me maximum download is Android 5.1 Lollipop.

   

   downloads by android version

2. The Country which gave maximum downloads is India. Because I released it in India. It is likely that you get most downloads from your own country in the beginning stages. 

   

   downloads by country

3. If you release an update with some extra features, there is probability of getting more downloads per day.
4. If you have High Rating per larger number of downloads, there is a probability of your app coming up in the Ranking list for your country.
5. If you integrate Google Play games achievements, There is a 99% chance of download numbers getting doubled (because some people simply play for Google gamer XP).
6. Same way, If you integrate Google play leader board in your app, numbers may go up vigorously.
7. Store listing plays an important role in Play store app search. Users search by keywords. If the app description contains those keywords, exposure to your app may get high.

Finally, Some tips for New developers,

1. In the initial days of your publishing, try to share the app link with your friends as much as you can. This may increase your app's initial rating and thus the ranking. Apps with high rating and high downloads get much exposure.
2. Keep Your App's store listing very effective. This helps in searches made by users as explained above.
3. Try to integrate Google play services such as Play achievements, Leaderboards etc in the app.
4. Keep on releasing new updates by removing errors in the current one. Try to minimize crashes and ANR (App not responding s). Users won't like an app which crashes regularly.
5. Give high importance on user feedback. Because they are your primary clients.

Any suggestions or doubts regarding the publishing process? Let me know! drop a comment below. I'll reach out to you as fast as possible.

Also read 'How to publish an Android App in Google Play store'

Hope this article helped you in getting an idea of how Post publishing things work in play store.

Cheers!

&

All the best for your App. 

Author : Unknown

He is a simple passionate tech freak who himself is an engineering student at Canara Engineering college. He likes App Development, Web designing, Blogging, Youtubing, Debugging and also is a CodeGeek!

Sharing is sexy!

Related Articles