New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Small Developer Attempting to Verifying Large Corp Stats
Ask HN: Small Developer Attempting to Verifying Large Corp Stats
3 by araes | 0 comments on Hacker News.
General Question: Being a small app developer (like 1-5), how do you verify anything Google (or any FAANG frankly) tells you? Bgd: Made a few apps. Tried them out on the store. Found that the stats looked "suspicious." People do not even accidentally find my apps. Back in 2021, humans apparently download 111.3 billion mobile apps. Not mine. At least based on the stats Google shows me. Google says I had ~10 downloads over the last 3 years, and ~100 looks ever (mostly spike on release and then no looks ever again). Honestly, maybe the app store situation is just horrible, and with 3500 apps a day, there's no reason to ever waste months making anything unless you've got deep advertising pockets or an already known brand. I have already mostly gotten out because of the "Update Your Target API" issue. However, had a similar issue with YouTube. Made videos in recent news topics with limited obvious competition (searched to see if there are many others). Nothing. Not even accidental hits. So how do people who are not major publishers actually figure out whether Google is unfairly hiding your app? Or in the really dystopian version, how do you verify Google is not just totally falsifying ad clicks? Or if you're a small musician/content creator, how do you verify there's actually any "competition" and its not just Google/Spotify/iTunes picking winners? Since if I really just wanted to cheat and milk people for money, I would charge ads, make a botnet to click the ads I want to have pay me, and then charge everybody a bunch of money. And now the WWW is apparently >50% bots...
3 by araes | 0 comments on Hacker News.
General Question: Being a small app developer (like 1-5), how do you verify anything Google (or any FAANG frankly) tells you? Bgd: Made a few apps. Tried them out on the store. Found that the stats looked "suspicious." People do not even accidentally find my apps. Back in 2021, humans apparently download 111.3 billion mobile apps. Not mine. At least based on the stats Google shows me. Google says I had ~10 downloads over the last 3 years, and ~100 looks ever (mostly spike on release and then no looks ever again). Honestly, maybe the app store situation is just horrible, and with 3500 apps a day, there's no reason to ever waste months making anything unless you've got deep advertising pockets or an already known brand. I have already mostly gotten out because of the "Update Your Target API" issue. However, had a similar issue with YouTube. Made videos in recent news topics with limited obvious competition (searched to see if there are many others). Nothing. Not even accidental hits. So how do people who are not major publishers actually figure out whether Google is unfairly hiding your app? Or in the really dystopian version, how do you verify Google is not just totally falsifying ad clicks? Or if you're a small musician/content creator, how do you verify there's actually any "competition" and its not just Google/Spotify/iTunes picking winners? Since if I really just wanted to cheat and milk people for money, I would charge ads, make a botnet to click the ads I want to have pay me, and then charge everybody a bunch of money. And now the WWW is apparently >50% bots...
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