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Jon R. Helms asked

App usage calculation

How is app usage duration figured out? If the app is idle but in front does that count? What about if a cut-scene or podcast is playing in the app?

Message was edited by: Jon R. Helms

amazon appstoretestingamazon underground
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3 Answers

Ellen@amazon avatar image
Ellen@amazon answered
Amazon determines app usage as the amount of time that an Android Activity for your app is open and running in the foreground of a mobile device. Amazon uses four standard Android lifecycle calls to determine when an Activity gains or loses focus and is in the foreground: onStart onPause onResume onStop Apps that close prematurely (or crash) and do not trigger the appropriate events will have reduced accuracy in usage measurements. Try to manage your app crashes and activity lifecycle events appropriately to ensure an accurate usage measurement for Amazon. See the Android developer documentation about the Android Activity Lifecycle for recommendations: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity.html
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Jon R. Helms avatar image
Jon R. Helms answered
Thanks!
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madcaplogic answered
I have four apps in Underground and am seeing a serious discrepancy between the number of downloads and the minutes tracked. In the month of February I've had 1,084 units downloaded, but only 2,056 minutes. Each app opens with a 2 minute splash video to introduce the characters before the user gets to the main menu, and thought they could skip,are unlikely to do so the first time through. So from this perspective only about a hundred users have even opened any of the apps. This is consistent across all 4 apps. It would take any one child roughly 5+ hours to access and use the lesson content in each app, if they ran through only once start to finish. The apps partly pull video from Amazon Web Services for content, and those analytics clearly show a dramatically different picture. There is a huge amount of use indicated there, to the extent that I'm actually paying Amazon Underground for app use via my AWS account. I can understand the issue of tracking from http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity.html . However, this deals with optimization, I seem to have no usage tracking whatsoever. It's as if they were invisible even on opening which is a basic activity. I've been told that most apps 'just work' and can find few if any others in forums who are having the extent of trouble I'm seeing. I'd appreciate some insight and guidance as I'm currently gaining popularity on the Underground platform, but losing money.
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