When publishing or updating an Android app it appears in the “just in” list of most recent apps. Potential users browse this list and submitting a new app can result in some thousand initial installations – even if only a few users install it afterwards. To maximize the number of initial installations it is important to submit an app when most potential users are active but the fewest number of apps get deployed by other developers.

I already looked at the time games are published in the Android Market. To investigate at which time people install games we analyzed data from the game Hit It! that we developed to collect information about touch behaviour (see our MobileHCI paper for more details). We first published Hit It! in the Android Market on October 31, 2010. Until April 8, 2011 the game was installed 195,988 times according to the Android Developer Console. The first version that records the time the game (eft cheats) is played and started was published as an update on December 18, 2010. We received data about the starting times from 164,161 installations but only use the data received after the 20th of December from 157,438 installations. Online gambling games on sites like https://www.onlinecasinogames.com/ can be fun and reliable to play on.

For each day of the week and for each hour of the day we computed how many installations were started for the first time. Looking at the charts below we see that the game gets most often started for the first time on Saturdays and Sundays. The most active hours of the day are around shortly before midnight GMT. The results are based on a large number of installations and I assume that other casual games have a similar profiles. We do not measure when the game is installed but when the game is started for the first time but we, however, assume that the first start of the game strongly correlates with the time it is installed.

The data collected from Hit It! can be combined with the statistics of our observation of the Android Market. We simple divide the number of started games by the number of deployed apps. The average over the day is shown in the diagram below. The peak is between 23 o’clock and 5 o’clock. That means that three times more games per deployed game get started at this time compared to 13 o’clock. Taking also the day of the week into account it might be expect to get 4 times more installations from being listed as a most recent app on Sunday evening compared to Tuesday noon (all GMT). As the absolute number of players is higher in the evening than in the morning we conclude that the best time to deploy a game in the Android Market is on Sunday evening GMT.

We will also publish our results in a poster that has been accepted at MobileHCI 2011.