993102 - [Android] Successful installs may be lower than average - may be getting failed installs

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Marketplace Graveyard :: General, defect, P3)

Description

[David Bialer [:dbialer]]

Attachment: app install rate android.csv

When I look at successful app install rates in Google Analytics, it appears that the successful install rate is fairly low on Android.  That is, with GA, we track a 'click to install' event and a 'successful app install' event.

I looked at about the top 20 apps and looked at click to installs vs successful app installs.  Added attachment as a CSV. 

It may be that people are abandoning the install or that we are getting the event reported back correctly.  

Thought we should investigate.

Comment 1

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

Attachment: New apps user install flow

Using the marketplace requires the user to disable a security setting. On modern Android this is a very opaque process and varies with device. Requiring the user to go through the install process twice for the first time. There are many places the user can fall off the enable unknown sources process.

Comment 2

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Another possibility is that bug 985614 is reducing the number of reported installs, since it means we don't call the onsuccess callback after installing packaged apps.

There might also be multiple factors here, including bug 985614, the requirement to enable third-party sources that kbrosnan mentions in comment 1, and other stuff we haven't identified yet.

Comment 3

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

bwalker also noted in a conversation today that most app installs on Android are presumably using the old runtime, since that's the runtime in the latest stable release, 28.

Comment 4

[David Bialer [:dbialer]]

I think the main issue is to accurately report back to the developer the number of installs in their stats.  Currently we are relying on the Google Analytics metric in our report to developers.

Comment 5

[Andy McKay]

It looks like the correct callbacks are being sent on install and cancel events now, so I suspect these statistics will sort themselves out, we should watch over the next few days.