Ovi Store and GetJar Downloads: Three Week summary
Monday, December 14th, 2009
Ok, it’s been about three weeks since my Species Explorer mobile application passed Ovi QA and popped onto the Ovi Store, and about two weeks since I added it to the GetJar storefront as well. So a good time to sit back and see how the downloads look and start a bit of simple analysis on how effective they are in getting your mobile application out there. Or I should really say my Species Explorer application, because a different application may have completely different downloads than what mine has.
Before I start into the numbers, a couple things about the application. Species Explorer Mobile is an application designed to work with my Species Explorer online site and let users browse and post wildlife sightings using their mobile device. For the current version, this means a Nokia 5th edition touchscreen phone like the 5800 or N97. The application is a free download.
For both stores, I did very little cross-promotion as I wanted to see simply how many downloads could be generated by the store itself just by existing in its catalog. So no credits injected to put it in any “featured” area, or Google ad buys, etc. GetJar does offer tools for publishers to pay to promote their apps, Ovi does not as far as I know, yet, but I’m sure will be coming in Ovi “2.0″.
For Ovi, the application was entered into the Social Networks area (It didn’t really fit neatly into other categories, and Species Explorer is essentially a social network for wildlife enthusiasts). For GetJar for reasons I have already forgotten (perhaps just to contrast with Ovi’s category) it ended up in the Travel->More Travel section.
Ovi Store
So enough preamble, let’s get to numbers. For Ovi Store, the first week’s download numbers were a pleasant surprise. They looked like this:
Day 1: 553
Day 2: 1425
Day 3: 1512
Day 4: 743
Day 5: 628
Day 6: 495
Day 7: 264
After that first week, the numbers dropped quickly to below 100 downloads per day, levelling off to be between 20-30 downloads per day on average. I assume the dropoff to be directly correlated to how quickly my app fell off the main “home” screen at the Ovi store. However, I may be wrong, as Ovi says that applications are sorted by a variety of factors, newness presumably being only one of them.
What struck me as much as the surprising (to me) number of initial downloads was the variety of countries downloading the application. To date, 137 countries have downloaded Species Explorer, with the top 10 being:
| #1 | United Kingdom | 533 |
| #2 | Italy | 448 |
| #3 | Germany | 313 |
| #4 | Turkey | 308 |
| #5 | Saudi Arabia | 303 |
| #6 | France | 294 |
| #7 | Spain | 281 |
| #8 | India | 249 |
| #9 | Indonesia | 195 |
| #10 | Russian Federation | 170 |
Considering my app is only in English, it was nice to see so many international downloads. And just reinforces to me that Ovi is definitely very powerful for giving your application a global reach.
All in all, I was more than happy with the results from getting Species Explorer onto the Ovi Store. Now I will be looking into ways in which to keep the application “fresh” and visible (the old “Top 25″ problem in the AppStore?) I expect Ovi will be pushing out ways for publishers to do that this year. For now, I presume getting good reviews for your app, and star ratings will help bump your app to the top of the list.
GetJar
I put up Species Explorer Mobile on GetJar a week after Ovi, so the stats are a bit sparser in more ways than one. For the two weeks it’s been there, the application has about 100 downloads. Although I am a bit suspicious of the stats as it seems it will say one number in a view, then show another when I click another view, ie going from month to month in the reports. So not sure if they have all their backend ducks in a row there.
In any case, no matter the view I pick, the total number of downloads comes to 100. A far cry from the whirlwind of activity I saw on Ovi. Which could be attributed to a variety of possible factors:
- no GetJar catalog preinstalled on handsets?
- app category less visible than the category chosen in Ovi Store?
- less of an international presence and/or smaller user base
- fewer supported handsets (5th edition touchscreen) in GetJar userbase
GetJar does offer various stats options for download/viewing, which again seemed inconsistent (eg show “no data” when there should be data). But they do tell some info, such as that a majority of users are to the 5800XM or N97 handsets. This jives with what the Ovi report showed as well, which was basically 60% 5800XM and 30% N97.
Moving forward, I’ll look into a few ways to try and boost more traffic to these storefront and/or position it more prominently. Also when the app becomes available to other platforms like Android, iPhone, etc I will compare experiences there as well.
The bottom line for now, Ovi seems to be a great opportunity to get significant downloads. GetJar is, at least for my app so far, less powerful. That said, GetJar is free and easy to get your app up onto its store, so no reason NOT to do it as well. So do both! Please share any comments and corrections to the above.
