The Android Market is a crowded marketplace. In order to maximize the initial number of installations the timing for deploying your app can be crucial. When publishing or updating an Android app it appears in the “just in” list of most recent apps. Thus, you probably don’t want to release a game when all the other developers do it as well. To find the best point in time to submit a game to the Android Market it is important to know when other developers submit new games or update existing ones.

Monitoring the Android Market

We implemented a script that monitors new and updated apps in the Android Market using the android-market-api. The script retrieves the 10 newest or updated apps from the Market’s eight categories for games once every 10 minutes. Starting on March 11, 2011 we monitored the Market for two months. As the script needs to provide a locale and an Android version we could only record apps that are available for users with the locale en_US and the Android version 2.1.

Point in time games get deployed

To determine when games get published we took the average over the eight categories for games and the time we monitored the Market. The graph below shows the average number of deployed games per hour for each weekday. 25% more games get deployed on an average Friday compared to Mondays.

The average number of games published in the Android Market per day (relative to GMT). Error bars show standard error.

We looked at the time of the day games get installed in more detail. The graph below shows the distribution over the day new apps get deployed in the Market. The peak is around 16 o’clock GMT. At this time more than twice the number of games get published than at less populated times. Less frequented hours are around 6 o’clock in the morning (GMT) and after 22 o’clock in the evening (GMT).

The average number of games published in the Android Market per hour of the day (relative to GMT). Error bars show standard error.

Our results suggest that the most popular day to submit a game is Friday and the least popular day is Monday. Furthermore, we learned that most games get deployed between 12 o’clock and 17 o’clock (GMT) while less active hours are after 18 o’clock and before 11 o’clock. One should probably try to avoid these hours.

Knowing when other developers deploy their games is surely important but knowing when Android users install games is a least equally important. One should certainly look for the time a lot of users are looking for new games but only few developers want to satisfy their needs.