Statistics revisited

Another episode of the 4-weekly statistics and some additional information

• Growth is steady. Last month we’ve seen a 4% increase.
• Crashes and ANRs (unresponsive screens) are again slashed. In the last 7 days (Taken because now most are on 1.37):
  • we have seen zero ANRs, cool!
  • we had 4 crashes, two were instances of the same problem.

The 30 days crashes and ANRs statistics now put us way above the “bad behavior thresholds” google has defined, and solidly into the second quadrile of all applications. We strive for the third quadrile, meaning less issues than the median of all applications in the Play Store. Though you might not notice “less crashes” actively as a user, it is improving the perception in the long run a lot. It is also bloody hard work!

ANRs and crashes are measured as percentage of affected daily sessions, where a daily session is defined as a day where an individual user used the app at least once. For example: suppose on Monday 20 users use the app once or more, and on Tuesday 30, then there are 50 daily sessions in those two days. If one user has 2 crashes on Monday, it counts as one affected session. If no crashes occurred on Tuesday, the crash rate over those two days is 2%. Google defines “bad behavior” for crashes as more than 1.09% over the last 30 days. Given that we see roughly 100 reported daily sessions per day, only one crash per day is “allowed”, though the median of all apps is 0.32%.

Now there are two important notes to address:

• We only see total numbers. The reports are heavily anonymized and not generated at all if the total number of daily sessions for them is too low. This seems to be to avoid pinpointing users, which is a good thing. Though I admit I sometimes see errors where I think “how did the user manage to do that?”
• Only users who allow sharing of usage and statistics provide this data, so we have no way of knowing how many actual daily sessions are operated. While we understand the privacy impact, especially towards google, we are very grateful to users who do have this option set to on as it allows us to notice issues and act fast on them. To check or change: Settings > Google > Three dots menu > Usage & Diagnostics > On / Off