Hey, this is the Daily Overpass! My name is Eric and I make apps!
Now today, I want to talk about the recent drop in downloads on Google Play.
Alright, so there appears to have been some sort of change to the Google Play
algorithm over the last week, which is causing a lot of developers to suffer.
Over the weekend, I received several emails from people asking whether or not
I'd been affected by it because they have seen their app downloads drop
50 to 90 percent overnight. So, just fallin off a cliff. Even this
morning, I just got an email from Radu who was saying - who sent through a bunch
of links to some blog post because basically - okay, so just to let you know, I
have not seen any change on - for any of my apps and my revenue. In fact my AdMob
revenue has kind of gone up a little bit over the last few days and I don't know
why. But my impressions of my daily
downloads, they pretty much remain consistent for me. But Radu sent
through a bunch of links through and said, "You know, I've seen some posts and
he's been - some games going up and down and I've talked to people who've seen
their downloads dropped 90% and it's like their livelihood." So, if you have a
look at my screen here, there's a article here on a game of Sutra which talks
about the thousands of indie Android devs on the brink of extinction after
plague changes and visibility algorithm rules and apparently this started around
last Thursday. And a lot of people are really suffering. People who were making
thousands of downloads a day, they just seen it drop completely.
And I've seen other things, hear about it being related to the -
related apps on Google Play and everything like that. There's not a
lot of details because there's been no official announcement from Google Play,
but what I want to do is - Radu sent through a bunch of forum links here for
Unity and a bunch of Reddit threads here. I'm going to include those in the
description in case any of you, guys, are suffering from this then hopefully you
could do that. And there's a discord group too. But what I wanted to do was
address this issue because I've been asked so much in the last few days
whether or not it was affecting me and it's not it's not affecting me yet. But
it seems to be affecting a lot of people. But it is a scary proposition and it's
something that as an app developer, every time you hear about this kind of stuff
happens, especially since nobody really knows what's going on, I think that's the
scariest part about it. It's not like like if they said, "Oh, it's happening to
people who did such-and-such or you know, maybe they violated a rule,
but that's not what's happening. It's just seemed to be random at the moment.
And it's happened in certain people, so while it's happening to them it could
easily happen to me in the future. And this is something that just shows the
fragility of of the markets. Well, we rely on Google, it's not just the app markets,
it's YouTube occasionally has algorithm changes and a lot of people
suffer because of that. And other people probably went out because of that. I
remember when the Panda thing came out for the SEO and a lot of websites which
are ranking really high, so ranking you know, started dropping and everything like
that. It is a fragile market and something to always keep in
mind. So, I don't really have a lot to say about this today. Like I said, I'm not
affected by it. But I would like to ask you, guys, how many of you have been
affected by this -the change on Google Play? Have you seen a significant drop in
downloads? I mean, I look through all my big apps and haven't seen any damp drop
at all. The smaller apps has not enough daily downloads to really be able
to tell. It could just be a normal fluctuation. So, that's all I want to talk
about today. Let me know are you, guys, being affected by this? If you are or if
you're not because I would like to kind of know if it's a large part of
the population that I luck out big-time or is it something that's coming. And you
know, over the next few days mine might drop off too from a self
selfish point of view. So, let me know what you, guys, think. Are you, guys, having
this kind of issues? And I'm gonna put the links to all this in there so
hopefully for those of you, guys, who are suffering with it, if you haven't found
these resources, you can go there and look. And if you put any resources in the
comments and if you put links in comments as in YouTube, sometimes they go
to spam. I'll try to check that so that I could put those on there too. So any
resources for those of you, guys, who need that and hopefully Google Play will
come out with some sort of announcement and we'll find out what's going on in
the next few days. Anyway, that's it for today. I'll talk to you, guys, again tomorrow!