CanZE

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

Four weeks after the first statistics post, a short update on the subjects touched.

• We’ve rolled out 2 new versions since. Well technically 3, but one was in error and superseded within an hour;
• Growth the usual 4+% over the last month;
• Massive (75+%) reduction in crashes and non-responsive states (ANRs).
• I speculate April will see more of the same as the version released just 3 days ago tackles again 9 of those issues. Our goal is to at least half the crash and ANR rate again.
• Three crashes after release are already fixed and committed for the next release, one of which is an issue that is very specific for Android 7.1. and one specific for Android 8.1.

We’re slowly heading into more esoteric territory where problems are less bug fixing and more avoiding platform issues on specific Android versions and/or on specific phones.

Please note that every single crash or ANR is anonymously reported through google *). While annoying do realize we investigate and almost always fix each and every one of them. The changelist is always available here.

*) if you didn’t disable that of course. Here’s Google’s wording on that verbatim:

You can view your app’s technical performance details collected from a subset of Android devices & OS versions, whose users have opted in to automatically share usage and diagnostics data. Learn more

CanZE has no “phone home” capabilities, but Google acquires quite a bit of data and I thought it would be fun to give you a bit of an insight at what we’re up against.

• We are seeing a fairly consistent growth rate of 40% per year. The metric we use is “Installed on devices that have been online in the last 30 days”. As I write this in early March we’re seeing a total of roughly 4400 active installs.
• Not surprisingly more than half of the installs are in Germany, France and the UK.
• The top 6 devices are all Samsungs and a quick addition of all Samsung branded devices added up to over 1300.
• Of the operators what was interesting to see is that about 20% have no operator listed. I interpreted that as devices having a second life without SIM card for basically CanZE only. I like that. Although those would be slow to update and probably miss out on the news bar.
• Android versions: about 2700 are on Android 7 or higher, but believe it or not, 60 are on Android 4 and just over 300 on 5.

For health statistics we get quite detailed aggregated reports on crashes and hangs. The last couple of weeks you have seen quite bunch of new releases and that is because we really stepped up our efforts to root out as many as possible and as soon as we see them. To give some sort of idea, in the last 7 days, and filtering out devices that have not been updated for months we’ve seen:

• One non responsive screen
• Eight different clusters of crashes, 6 of which were reported only once.
• The two were basically the same and accounted for 13 actual crashes. It is a silly bug in the Tyres screen.

As you can imagine it is that last problem we try to quickly focus on and it shouldn’t be a surprise that it is already fixed in the development branch and it will be fixed in the next release. And so are 3 of the single instance ones. For those interested, you can always check out what is in the pipeline here.

When we release about 35% of the active devices are updated within a day, and 70% within a week. But also note that if we assume the three last releases to be “current”, about 18% is not in that bracket after a week. A year after a release is superseded we still see about 2% of that release on active devices. And that is why we need to filter out some of the crashes.

Unfortunately we can’t see how much CanZE is actually used*) so it’s not easy to put those in perspective, but then again, less than 3 crashes per day on a 4000 installed base is too much but not crazy.

*) No, the new news bar does not tell us that. It fetches the news bar from github and we don’t have statistics about it’s usage.