I know there's an entire universe out there of SEO people who do this sort of thing for a living, but I've got my fun little open-source Android Wear watchface, and it kinda bums me out that Google's never "featured" it, which makes it almost impossible to discover on the Play Store.

Or so I thought.

But now they've got a new feature in the Play Store dev console that tells you who's visiting your page, giving you data like this (for CalWatch, month of July 2015 -- they have no earlier data, and my August data looks similar):



I've got somewhere around 350 people who've installed the app, and I'm getting well more than that visiting my app's page every month, but my "conversion rate" is much lower than this. There's also an attrition rate that they don't tell you, but they roughly balance out, so my net number of users is staying flat.

This contrasts with my other free/open-source app, a timer/stopwatch thing. For that, I'm getting half as many visitors, but sometimes a much higher conversion rate. I assume this is because there are zillions of watchfaces out there but many fewer stopwatch apps, so if you're looking for one, you're more likely to find mine.

Of particular interest is that I'm getting much higher conversion rates from external deep links to my stuff. Poking around Google, I found one thread in German somewhere and another thread on Reddit, each of which had some linky action. That's it, but it's more than nothing.

Anyway, new data is fun. Any thoughts on how to get myself more users? Do I even want more users really? It's not like I'm getting paid for this.

I'm one of the users who's installed your watch face. I like the idea but it's just not the watch face for me.

- I don't have enough events during the day that I don't know what I have to do. I have plenty of appointments during a week, but if I'm at one, I have never had trouble remembering what time the next one is coming up. Others might not have that issue.

- I don't like "analog" watch faces. I know it makes me a dork, but I like having a digital readout. It's faster for me. And given that the Moto 360 takes a frustratingly long time to wake up when I lift it to view (seriously, why is that?), I want to save every millisecond I can.

- I like having different information on my watch face. I like having tomorrow's weather, number of emails, texts, battery life, whatever.

Again, I like the idea of your watch face, but it's just not for me. To be fair, I still haven't found a face I like...

I've been pondering whether I should write a new one or not. I've got some ideas for integrating a stopwatch with a watchface using the new "interactive" API. That said, this was originally just an exercise to get my Java chops back up to stuff and I've got plenty of other things I could work on.

I think that the idea is a cool one, and it should be a good app for some users. It just doesn't fit my life.

I'm certainly impressed with your ability to put this all together!

Heh. Right now, I'm teaching a sophomore-level algorithms, data structures, software engineering, intro to Java programming class. The freshman year is all in Python, so this is their first exposure to the language. Most of my free cycles these days are in a world of lists and trees and queues and heaps...

Hoo boy, that makes my head spin. I didn't do well in comp sci in college...

Fun factoids:

CalWatch currently stands around 4400 lines of code. For my sophomore CS class, I've currently written around 5900 lines of code.

The students will be building a subset of that, and I'll be dribbling out my code in the week after each assignment is due so they've got "correct" reference code to build upon.

Also curiously, I seem to keep finding minor little bugs in both codebases...

You should give your students extra credit when they find a bug in your code.

Ahh, shameless exploitation of free labor...