How are weekly active devices calculated?

store
1

Hello! How does Snap determine user uniqueness and what algorithm does it use to count active devices? Also, can you tell me about the status: “Metrics for the most recent days may be incomplete or missing. They will be updated and accurate within a few hours.” We’ve had it for several weeks now.

2

It’s not (as far as I recall) user uniqueness, it’s device uniqueness. When snap checks for updates to installed packages (such as via snap refresh), it tells the Snap Store the versions of each package it has installed, channel, and a unique machine ID.

The store replies with the revisions that the client can update. It also keeps a record of each machine ID, the host OS & version, region, and architecture.

The statistics you see on the developer page are essentially the collected data.

There’s a massive overnight job which updates the stats, and sometimes failes, or times out. In the past you’d just see the stats pages all drop to zero overnight, and we’d all ping the devops people. Now it still happens now and then, but there’s a banner to let you know they know. I guess so we don’t keep pinging them.

2 Likes
3

See also: Https://snapcraft.io/snaps : "Snap installs" =?

Writing a page into Snap documentation | Snapcraft documentation would be welcome.

4

Thank you for the information! I also have another question - besides Snap stats, I also collect Google Analytics statistics, and according to my data, there is a discrepancy. In Snap, I see 20% more active devices than users in Google Analytics. Could you possibly suggest why this might be the case?

5

People Googling how to install your app generally happens once, alongside googling anynews updates infrequently.

They’re not measuring the same thing so wouldn’t really get comparable metrics.

The whole point of a software repo is to be able to download the program without ever having to connect to its upstream website afterall.

Snap isn’t measuring the app is actually used either, merely that it’s installed and attempted to update. Google Analytics will generally be entirely active clients.