How many downloads has my App had?

We won't know until the end of the month when Apple will give us our financial reports. I wish we could find out sooner. I could have sold 50, 500 or 1,000 apps - I just don't know!

Hopefully for many of us it will be like waiting for Christmas to get those reports!

Frank

No official numbers, but you can make estimates from available data.

If you post your application on versiontracker, they will count the number times your app is downloaded *through their site.*
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/iphone/35317

Then multiply that number by 100 or 1000 to guestimate how many total sales from iTunes you're getting.

Alternately, medialets.com has tried to figure our revenue based on the number of reviews your application has gotten. They seem to think each review equals roughly 1500 downloads. Statistically this is total BS; comparing review #'s to the published sales ranking shows that review #'s vary wildly.
http://www.medialets.com/blog/2008/07/14/revenue-from-app-store-activity/

You can also watch the "most popular" charts on itunes to see if your app is in there; no way to translate that into $$ though.

Huh? How can you download an app from versiontracker? I thought the only (official, anyway) way to download an install an app was through iTunes?

Sure it's BS. We're all lacking in data so we were looking for a proxy by which to measure - and having a little fun in the process. Reviews are a wildly inaccurate meter, but in the absence of any other, it's at least worth observing them.

To actually measure downloads, we (Medialets - I'm the CEO) provide a framework that's a lot like Google Analytics for iPhone apps:

http://www.medialytics.com/

It's free for all developers and can be used whether you charge for your app or give it away. Rolling your own analytics or installing something like our analytics package is the only way to directly measure your app's performance on a real-time or near real-time basis.

Happy to answer any questions here, on our site or directly at eric.litman@medialets.com / 703-852-0582.

Sorry Eric, didn't mean to give offense; I think the data yous guys provided is great - both the sales chart and the apps-by-category-and-price. I just wanted to express my un-confidence in the soundness of that method.

You're doing the same thing I am - trying to extrapolate numbers from the slimmest of data. I hope you're right about the reviews, actually - I have lots of reviews, and need a new car. 🙂

Versiontracker has lists of iTunes apps, but when you click "buy it," you are taken to the iTunes store. I am guessing that versiontracker is an iTunes affiliate, and uses the sales numbers they get from the affiliate program to track the # of purchases.

I'm sure they get only a fraction of the traffic that the app store does; but if you multiply that fraction by 100 (too low - I doubt they're 1% of apple's traffic) or 1000 (still low, but my gut feeling,) you'll get into the ballpark.

xsmasher - you need to go to the Medialets web site and take a closer look at how they gather their data...it's actually more accurate in many ways than anything Apple can offer. My only concern with their method is the privacy issue, but I still plan on using it for my first app.

Medialets "google analytics" type tracking, yes - I'm sure it's very accurate, and I'm sure many developers will take advantage of it, since it's a vast improvement in frequency and granularity compared to Apple's monthly reports.

When I called BS, I was talking about sales predictions based on # of reviews. As Eric mentioned, it's a just-for-fun calculation that shouldn't be taken seriously.
Looking at the blog article I linked to, do you disagree?

There's also http://www.pinchmedia.com/ Not sure how they compare at this point.

Version tracker lists 692 apps, with most of them under 40 DLs. If we rough out the numbers, we could estimate 700 apps * 50 DL avg = 3500 DL. Apple reported 10mil DLs, so that suggests that versiontracker captured 3500/10mil of the DLs, or 0.035%. Assuming that all the app types are equally popular among versiontracker users, we come out with a factor of 2857 to multiply your app's versiontracker DL count to get the real count. That seems a bit high, and the avg. DLs per app is already guesstimated pretty high. if someone could just add up the total DLs from versiontracker...

VersionTracker wasn't up at the time the AppStore opened. It's also not clear if this is just a click count or actual downloads. In any case they don't have all the apps. They populated some but ignored others so it's hard to use them as a real guide for much of anything. Not sure how they made their selections.

Also, I'm pretty sure versiontracker download count is simply the number of times someone clicked through from version tracker to your app on the iTunes store using their download now button... Probably not a 1-1 to sales.

Based on an admittedly quick comparison Medialets looks to be more professionally designed and has better stats, but Pinch Media comes out ahead by caching stats on the device when an internet connection isn't available...a critical feature if you want to track iPod Touch use.