Statistics about Snaps in Snap Store?

[mhsabbagh]

Hello.

It is probably known to most that Flathub provides download statistics for each day for every Flatpak package on the platform:

I am wondering whether it would be possible for Canonical to add similar statistics to the Snap Store?

Right now it only shows a heatmap for where they are being downloaded from, but without any numbers whatsoever.

It would be interesting to see how many Snap applications are getting downloaded each day, and how many users are depending on their continuous support.

What are your thoughts?

To be clear, I was informed by @eeickmeyer that the Snap Store already has these stats but they are only shown for app developers. My suggestion is to make these statistics public so that everyone can see them just like Flathub.

Posting here after I wrongly posted in the Ubuntu Discourse.

[popey]

The short answer is no, the Snap store does not reveal stats per application because that could be proprietary business-sensitive information.

It’s up to the publishers or developers themselves to choose whether to reveal the data they have. However, some community people share the stats for snaps they’re responsible for.

Also, the stats Flathub and the snap store have are similar, but very much not the same, and should be interpreted differently.

The snapcraft store has stats for each application, for sure. However, they’re “Weekly active device” stats. So that means machines that have checked into the store looking for updates. If someone removes the application, they will soon stop being counted, and the graph will go down.

Flathub is counting downloads (both full and delta) not active machines. It says “Installs” which to some could mean “machines which have an install”, but it means “downloads of the software”. Flathub doesn’t have a concept of tracking how many machines have a flatpak installed, just how many downloads the server has served.

For example, here’s the stats for the Discord snap.

I think this nicely illustrates the “weekly active” stats. If you look just to the left of the black box containing versions, you’ll see a dip in the graph. That’s Christmas. Every Christmas, people turn off their computers for a bit, and almost every application the store dips like that.

Here’s similar data from the Discord flatpak published in Flathub.

The peaks are where there have been lots of delta downloads of the flatpak, which typically coincides with new releases of the Discord app. See how a large number of machines get the update on the day it’s published, then some more the next day, and some more the next. Add those delta numbers up over the course of a week or so, and you get a good “finger in the air” number for how many people have the flatpak of Discord installed.