From 13.5 million installs to 499 active devices
From 13.5M installs to 499 active devices
A solo developer's 2014 game hit 13.5 million installs, peaking at 886,208 active devices, but by 2026 it was down to 499. In a new release, a launch post got 493 views and zero installs. The author contrasts the old organic discovery via the Top New Free chart with today's ad-dominated store, and notes that monetization has improved—he can now sell in-app purchases, which wasn't possible from Serbia until 2021.
In 2014 the store handed a stranger's game to two and a half million people in a month because it had a chart on the front page and I happened to land on it. In 2026 reaching five hundred people takes deliberate work, and five hundred people is not enough to start anything.
- RetroTechie
"The new game is REDLINE: Longest Burn, an arena roguelite for Android. It is free, it works offline, and as of this writing almost nobody has played it. Discovery is my problem to solve this time."
As it will be for most software, imho. There's a limited suite of extremely popular software, and some locale-specific ones. Everything else is buried in a mountain of "the rest", where it's near-impossible to discover what's worth one's time (read: so >99.99% of potential users won't bother, and stick to well-known apps).
Logical consequence is that most of "the rest" turns into abandonware.
Big Tech's algorithms behind what's promoted on app stores, commercial interests, use of AI: all just make this worse. I don't see easy solutions to this problem. But if/when found, I suspect it'll be through community-run / grassroots efforts. "Monetization" otoh just turns everything to shit...
- boban-lukic
Author here. The downloads at the bottom of the page are the raw Play Console exports plus the merged monthly CSV the chart is drawn from. Happy to answer questions about either era.
- mdrzn
"Same developer, same store, twelve years apart."
"Local brand, rebadged hardware, ethernet port on the back, internet features in the menu"
"Keeping the download tiny was a decision, not a side effect."
God I hate the AI slop that I can instantly call out. If you MUST have your blog written by AI, please please please please implement a skill or something that does a second pass using this https://tropes.fyi/tropes-md so at least we remove all the USUAL tells. I cannot stand to read articles like this any longer.