Guess Who Is Using Photomath in 2021 (And on What Phones!)
New school year is under way 🎉! Hooray!
Maybe not everyone is excited as we are, but here at Photomath every BTS (Back To School) period we are experiencing drastically increased usage after the summer vacations. We were working hard during the summer to provide best support for the upcoming school year and BTS is one of our year’s pinnacle. In this period we are also analysing lots of data and adapting to ways on how Photomath is used so we can enhance learning of our users. This blogpost will give you a glimpse of some statistics data which was collected during this period.
Usage breakdown
So let’s start with the most mind blowing statistic data of them all: Math is mostly learnt during the school year! Joke aside, this is intuitively clear, but it is surprising that actually 1 out of 3 students will actually continue to learn Math during summer vacations. So, keep up the good work! Also, connected to learning patterns, we see that the peek weekly usage happens on Tue and Wed, while Weekends are the days with lowest usage. It seems that Weekends are mostly reserved for some other activities. 🎾 🥾 😴 The peek intraday usage time happens from 7AM — 11AM PST.
Our users aren’t actually only students, some proportion of our users are also parents and teachers. And this number is growing every year, in comparison to the last year we saw 5% uplift of the parents which use the application and almost 13% uplift in Teachers which use the application.
As most of our users are students, it is interesting to see what age groups are using Photomath the most. The usage by age is constantly growing with the exception of 17-year-olds where we see a drop (⁉️). The top Photomath users are high school seniors and after finishing high school and going to college, we see a bigger drop in usage. This is probably because math is a mandatory subject in high school, but after finishing high school most of the students choose a profession where math isn’t a main focus.
Device breakdown
This wouldn’t be an engineer blogpost without couple of engineering based data. As an Android engineer I find interesting checking devices trends, most reliable (and unreliable) devices how users adopt new Android versions.
One of the initial driver to write this blogpost was that I found lacking percentage of used architecture. Before, Google provided a breakdown of device architectures but this was recently removed (as it was outdated).
We see a total dominance of ARM based chips on the market. Currently, Photomath is supporting all mentioned architectures!
Most of Photomath are using the application on the mobile phones, but we also saw 60% uprise in tablet usage than year before!
Reliability is one of the main focus in the Photomath app team and along with our QA we are aiming to eliminate all usage culprits of our users. Android is very fragmented environment and achieving 100% stability isn’t possible, but we can proudly say that our stability rate is around 99.95% of the sessions and that is 15% better than our peers median!
Phones manufactures which are most popular among our Android users are Samsung and Xiaomi. In 2020 most used device was Redmi Note 7 but in 2021 BTS the first placed was seized by Samsung A51.
This BTS period most unstable device was Realme 6 and Realme 7 Pro, which have a specific issue with handling snapping mechanism when scrolling. Users owning those device experienced application crashes which were fixed in the meantime.
Online Teaching Increased Photomath Usage
Last year whole world was hit by a COVID virus changing our lives profoundly. Every country implemented similar restrictions and as everything was closing due to the threat of coronavirus, schools closed too. This lowered access to offline resources and educators which could have negative effect on some communities. We saw an obligation to help those who were affected by opening access to our subscription Photomath Plus.
As schools closed in Italy and USA, initially we saw a drop of Photomath usage, but as schools in those countries adopted online teaching we saw a steep usage curve!
This was just a glimpse to some of our statistical data, I hope to continue this breakdown every year and comparing the trends between BTS periods. If you have some suggestions on what to include in the upcoming breakdowns feel free to leave a comment!
In the meantime, if you found the data interesting or would like to join our effort to build the best app for helping learn Math check our careers page!
