Android market ranking and active installs
I have a game which has been available since July 2010. I've had 18,000 total downloads so far and average rating is 3.5.

When I search the arcade category it comes out below a lot of other apps which have both lower downloads and a lower ranking. For example one that is some 20 positions higher has 1,000 - 5,000 downloads and 2.5 stars.

My conclusion to this is that the active installs percentage weights very highly, mine is at 21%.

Now this low percentage is explainable by two things

1) Early versions of the app were 'beta' and it took a while to fix on all devices to work stable.

2) This was a 'demo' product, so I suspect a lot of people uninstalled due to completing the demo.

I have since updated the app to be ad-supported. In theory people would be more likely to keep this, and also the game has many more features that the original version. I am considering re-releasing the app as a new apk. This should reset the stats and hopefully give me a higher position that I currently occupy. I suspect the current uninstall rate is nowhere near as low because I have been monitoring the active installs vs recent downloads and it is much higher.

Has anyone got any experience of doing this, and was it a good idea? I don't want to abandon the current version as there are still 4000+ users on it. I guess I could release an update pointing them to the newer version.

Android market ranking and active installs
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I have a game which has been available since July 2010. I've had 18,000 total downloads so far and average rating is 3.5.

When I search the arcade category it comes out below a lot of other apps which have both lower downloads and a lower ranking. For example one that is some 20 positions higher has 1,000 - 5,000 downloads and 2.5 stars.

My conclusion to this is that the active installs percentage weights very highly, mine is at 21%.

Now this low percentage is explainable by two things

1) Early versions of the app were 'beta' and it took a while to fix on all devices to work stable.

2) This was a 'demo' product, so I suspect a lot of people uninstalled due to completing the demo.

I have since updated the app to be ad-supported. In theory people would be more likely to keep this, and also the game has many more features that the original version. I am considering re-releasing the app as a new apk. This should reset the stats and hopefully give me a higher position that I currently occupy. I suspect the current uninstall rate is nowhere near as low because I have been monitoring the active installs vs recent downloads and it is much higher.

Has anyone got any experience of doing this, and was it a good idea? I don't want to abandon the current version as there are still 4000+ users on it. I guess I could release an update pointing them to the newer version.
