Friday, January 1, 2010

Android Market : updating an application does not update its place in the 'by date' order anymore ?

Today, I updated my 'Word Prospector' Game, with a small bugfix.

I then took my phone, went to the market to see and test from the market the change.
And ... I couldn't find my game in the top of the list sorted by date !!!
It should have been there, at the first place. But, no, I tried to find it, but couldn't because it was sooo far in this list...

It could be a temporary, local bug, and maybe the old market behavior will come back in the next days / hours ( the famous bug of the 2K10 year ? )?
But I feel like it is a big change in the market policy !

What are the consequences of such a move :
* The "By Date" order in the market gets its real meaning back : you won't always see the same applications in this list. It's quite true that it was strange to see a very old application at the top of this list !
* Constantly improving / debugging your application will have a much lower impact on your visibility on the market. By now, every new version brings some new users. This could be the end of this behavior. Does it means people won't update / improve / debug their applications as much as before ?
* it certainly means it will be better to make a lot of application rather than having an application you constantly improving
* Perhaps it means you should make a 'top quality' appplication from day one, because improving it won't bring you any more users ( but that was already the case because of the ratings : if at start your ratings are low, it is very difficult to change them )
* Will people create a new application when they want to release a new version, or at least when a new feature is integrated in their version ?

Can we consider it is the market getting more mature ?
In my case, I hope that it's just a bug...

What do you think ?


EDIT : It looks like I've been alarmed by a well known ( but that I didn't know ) : an updated application will be at the top of the 'By Date' only if the previous update was more than 'some time' before ("some time" being around one week )
I didn't know that, and didn't observe this behavior before !

Thank to all the people that gave me this info !

6 comments:

Psym said...

When was your last update? For the last few months the policy has been that an update will only move you to the top of the list if you haven't updated in a while.

Anonymous said...

Can you define, "in a while". Or point out the location of the info.

AndroidBlogger said...

@ Psym :
I was not aware of such a thing, but, it makes sense...
My previous update was from the 28th of December, so only a few days before...
I though I already made some updates within a few days after the previous one and have never seen this behaviour before...

But it looks like you're right, as after my update, I saw some applications arriving at the top of the list that were obviously some updates ( they had comments that were from 2009 ).

Thanks for this information !
Where did you find it ?
I neither couldn't find it anywhere...

Anonymous said...

I've read on the google forums that the delay is one week, but it wasn't an official statement.

Bjarni Rúnar said...

I've seen the same thing when publishing frequent updates to my WhereBlogger app.

I think they're trying to reduce developers' motivation to constantly publish bogus updates in an attempt to game the market. Preventing spam, basically, which is a good thing.

Anonymous said...

Hi,
After a few tests, I can confirm that the delay is one week, not from your last upgrade but from the last time you went up.