My app usually gets 7,000-10,000 installs per day. Suddenly, as of May 4th, the number of installs per day has come crashing down to ~1,000 installs per day. Yesterday was a mere 77 installs.
This doesn’t seem to be a reporting error either. The number of new installs, ad requests, and in-app purchases are also way down on the Unity dashboard.
The strange thing is … I have been improving all of my metrics: crash rate, ANR rate, ARPPU, rating, etc over the last few months. My app objectively works way better now. At first I thought the initial drop on Monday May 4th was due to workplaces and schools reopening in many countries, but I see no changes to my Apple Store stats, so it can’t be that.
The exact same thing just happend to both of my main two games on googleplay :(.
I just went from ~200 users a day to ~2 on May 7th.
My guess is that it has to do with google changing their search/recommendation algorithm again ( they apparently just released their may 2020 core algorithm update) A similar thing happened to me (and a lot of others) back in July/August 2018.
That time it was a combination of suddenly dropping in keyword rankings and being removed off all of the ‘similar games’ recommendation panels in the store, at least for my game. I wasn’t able to figure out anything to do to ‘fix it’ back then and it took almost a year before my numbers started to really recover.
