867855 - Marketplace API search: Allow download stats to be drilled down by device type

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Marketplace Graveyard :: Statistics, enhancement)

Description

[Parul Mathur]

Feature Request:
Currently, the Marketplace API allows searching for apps by supported device, e.g.
https://marketplace.firefox.com/api/v1/apps/search/?device=gaia
http://firefox-marketplace-api.readthedocs.org/en/latest/topics/search.html?highlight=device (One of ‘desktop’, ‘mobile’, ‘tablet’, or ‘gaia’.)

There is also a bug filed (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=867839) to surface the number of downloads in the JSON object returned by the API.

Can the search query be modified to drill down the number of downloads by device_type?
This would be very valuable in determining how many people are actually using the app on Firefox OS.

Comment 1

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

I don't have a problem with this at a high level, but two things come to mind:

1) At some point we should be using a stats API and not a search API.  I'm not sure where that line is, but I feel like we're getting close to it or might have passed it.

2) Stats are public at the option of the developers.  Total downloads we've always kept public so the bug you mention is fine, but now that you're breaking them down it is getting into greyer territory.

A solution would be to run this off of a stats API which is bound to the same public/private settings as the regular stats pages.

Comment 2

[Matt Basta [:basta]]

I'm inclined to WONTFIX this bug for a couple reasons. Most importantly:

1. The "devices" are a stop-gap until full-on feature profiling is implemented. Once packaged apps and payments are supported across all Mozilla platforms, there's no good reason to keep these around.
2. This isn't very useful for Mozilla since we can just look at Google Analytics.
3. This isn't very useful for developers since we can build better tools in their stats pages.
4. This isn't very useful for 3rd parties since developers can choose not to expose stats information to the public, meaning the data is always incomplete.

I'm all for a stats API and think that's a much better way to address this issue.

Comment 3

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

Wontfix for comment 1 and comment 2.  The device detection code is landing this week (I hope) which will change this also.

Comment 4

[Matt Basta [:basta]]

As a side note, we will probably implement a more appropriate API that deals with feature profiles when phase 2 of the buchets lands. That will likely be a part of the devhub API set. Buchner is working on the prd for that now.