Something very odd about my iOS App downloads in China
There’s something very odd happening right now with my two free iOS App downloads in China. Like, downloads are up 1000% since August 17, 2017, and they’re being downloaded at about the same rate since then, even though they are both in English, and cater to very different audiences.
For the record, they’re both fairly niche apps that lack a marketing budget, so the download rates have been historically very low worldwide, 1 or 2 per day—“in the noise,” if you will. Neither of the apps are localized, so they’re primarily downloaded in countries that speak English as their primary language. Both of the apps have a very low session count and non-existent in-app purchase rate. Neither app presents ads.
One app, What the Walrus Knows: A Guide to Beastie Energies—FREE!, is about animal totems. The other app, The Vicar’s Drummer Jokes and Celebrity Musician Guessing Game, is, well, about drummer jokes and guessing the names of celebrity musicians. The two apps couldn’t be more different.
I’m not trying to plug them, here, what I’m trying to do is point out that someone—or something—is downloading both of these apps at an alarmingly high and similar rate relative to the entire time these apps have been available (circa 2013 and 2014 respectively), in China, for reasons unknown to me.
Earlier this year, I noticed a modest increase in downloads for the Drummer Jokes app from 1–2 a day to about 20 a day, starting around May 20th (here is the 3 month period of April-July):
I didn’t really think much of it, at the time; maybe English classes in China were suggesting to download this app to students or something, but it carried on through the middle of August, so it started to seem odd.
And then, starting on August 17, downloads suddenly increased again, to 50–60 downloads a day (this is the month of August):
Curiously, on the exact same date, my other free app, What the Walrus Knows FREE, increased from its 1–2 a day rate to about the same download levels as the Drummer Jokes app, 50 to 60 a day:
Notice that they both also peaked in downloads at around 110 and 115 on the same day, August 25. And, this is occurring exclusively from the China App Store, no other country stores are showing an increase in downloads (Walrus app):
China is 93% of all downloads for the month of August, 95% since August 17.
This makes no sense at all
If we dig into App Store product page views, e.g., for the Walrus app, we see that they remained flat during August, so there is no correlation whatsoever between page views and the increase in downloads, and it’s not at all due to word-of-mouth (which would be nice) or advertising (which I don’t do for these apps):
The device sessions are similarly flat. There is also no change in in-app purchases. For comparison, my other four paid apps enjoy the same download rates as before.
In iTunes, I changed the store to China and peeked at my apps, but I did not see any new app ratings. And, according to AppFigures, these apps don’t even rank in the top 400 for their categories, even with the increase in downloads.
So, what’s going on, here? If you have free apps, have you noticed an uptick in downloads in China?
October 2017 Update
The problem appears to have corrected itself around September 29–30; downloads dropped from 60–70 a day to 5–10 a day.
