What does "Daily active devices" in the Snapcraft dashboard mean?

The Snapcraft Stats page says
"Daily active devices" tracks the number of unique devices that have contacted the Snap Store using a 7 day window, broken down by channel.
That would be Weekly Active Users (WAU), which is a different metric. It would be cool to have both DAU and WAU like in the Apple and Google stores, but if I had to choose, I would go with DAU because it’s more immediately useful following releases.

Is the description trying to say that the user metric service only reports application usage stats every 7 days, so the number displayed is actually the number of devices that reported multiplied by 7? If that’s the case, then the reporting interval should probably be changed to not align with the weekly period, but otherwise the math makes sense.

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@dmiller309 I agree the “Daily” prefix is misleading, it’s trying to convey the period in which the data is updated additionally to being explicit about the sampling-window, i.e. “this is a metric updated daily about the number of unique devices with this snap installed in the last 7 days” (no multiplication involved, as you hint on the second paragraph).

We will clarify the labels as “Weekly active devices …” promptly.

You have an interesting point about weekly & daily metrics, the store tracks both but we decided on presenting only the weekly ones (by channel, by version, by country) because they smooth daily changes which are not particularly easy to interpret and impact the actual figures differently depending on the snap.

For instance, on the daily metrics there will be a drop on weekends, representing users turning off their working desktops or cloud instances (and having a life, with their phones on). The deepness of this valley is more related to the nature of the snap (working or leisure) and the pattern computers are used globally than the actual user base growth trend. In other words, we considered the daily metric to be somehow distracting and not entirely insightful to snap publishers at this point of the ecosystem.

At the light of your comment, perhaps we should revisit this decision and allow snap publishers to compare weekly and daily patterns of active devices when they are sufficiently informed about their intrinsic differences.

Thanks for bringing this up and let us know if you have more ideas and suggestions. We are actively working on snap metrics and how to best expose them to developers.

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Thanks @cprov, that answers my question!

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