What is the difference between total installs and active installs in the Android market?

Question

What is the difference between total installs and active installs?

I have 90 total installs for my app and only 47 active installs. What does it mean?

Answer 1

Sometimes i think that it may be something different. For example my app has only 5 days being published...it's just a normal app(with no advertisement or promotion by me) so as anyone can understand only few friends of mine have downloaded it! So I have 4 total installs and only 1 active, still as I saw for myself my friends haven't uninstalled the app(4 of my friends downloaded). They have just downloaded it and used it for a couple of times. So i might be wrong, but my experience showed me that they just don't differ only between installations and uninstallations but between something else. Or what can I say they might hesitate to publish the totals :)

Answer 2

Total installs is how many times your app has been downloaded. Active installs are how many instances of your app are on (actively used?) devices -- i.e. not uninstalled. I imagine that if a user uninstalls your app, then re-installs it, your total download count would go up by two and your active install count by one.

Advertise! Create an ad campaign with something like AdMob (result will vary), find niche forums and android-specific forums like xda-developers, droid-life, etc., that would help more people notice your app. Inside your other apps, ad links to the app you want to promote. Put a share button in your app, or add in social networking. Perhaps promote your app on a 3rd-party app store like Amazon app store.

And don't forget that a poorly designed and rated app is far less likely to be downloaded.

Answer 3

Total Installs: Total number of times this app has been installed (Also counting those that later uninstalled the app).

Active Installs: Number of installs that are still installed on devices (These people have not yet uninstalled the app).

Answer 4

I don't know exactly about it. But, while observing one of my app statistics this was the observation:

Day 1 : 4 total user installs 1 active device installs

Day 3 : 4 total user installs 4 active device installs

According to the various discussion on web, active install may be related to total number of devices application is installed. But, there is something more to it, as pointed by john Active installs are how many instances of your app are on. So, even if the app is installed but not running it won't count!

Answer 5

The Active Install figure can be wrong. I just uploaded the app and installed it on my phone. The next day when I logged in to Android dev backend, I could see 1 Install and 0 Active Install.

I hadn't un-installed the app. This shows that the figure can be misleading.

Answer 6

But We must consider that Google Play statistics has some delay, usually (on this case) of one day. You will only see tomorrow the number of today's downloads. Evaluation, on the other hand, can be published almost instantly (numbers of 5, 4,... stars).