Version 1.0 of our DOT Placards product was released on 3 September, 2010. Today I checked in Android Developers Console and saw it has crossed the 10,000 download threshold. Huzzah!
The Android Marketplace doesn’t publish exact download numbers for consumers to see. Rather, it reports downloads as being within ranges such as < 10, 50-100, 1,000-5,000 and so on. But the bands get bigger as the counts go up. It gets to be a bigger and bigger deal to cross each threshold. (Note: It also takes a little while for the downloads figures to be updated. Consumers may not see us in the 10,000 – 50,000 band for another few days.)
We’ve been in 5,000-10,000 band for a long time and, for a time, were stalling out a bit on attracting new users. Then we removed the ads feature. Showing ads had never done anything for revenue, had probably annoyed some users, and required extra permissions at app install time. Taking them out was a great decision.
