Popularity Contest

Rating of apps keeps coming up, but nobody can decide how rating should work. I'm making this issue to suggest a popularity contest, an opt-in feature of F-Droid to share the list of installed apps to the server, so that the client could show how many users have a certain app installed and possibly sort it by user count in "Most popular" (to add to the categories list, probably below Recently Updated, who knows). This is vaguely based on an old IRC discussion.

The user count should be kept vague, as we will obviously only register part of the amount of users, perhaps just using some "progress bar" with the most popular app filling it 100%, and other apps filling it a percentage of that based on their active installs compared to the most popular app.

I've made the following quick mock-up, which uses Kontalk as an example app which has 0.8 times the amount of active installs the most popular app has as made-up statistic:

This is vaguely related to #53, but also not really, as a popularity contest and app rating can both exist (Google Play does both as well, but requires users to participate).

I think that this is quite a reasonable thing to propose. Especially given the opt in nature and the fact that Debian does it with quite some success without forcing people into it. Thanks for providing the useful mockup too.

Having said that, it is a big job, and requires changes on the server. Big changes. Currently, servers are typically static files being served by a web server such as Apache. Requests such as this and #53 require a web application of some sort which does not currently exist. So I'll keep this issue here, but please be aware that it will take dedicated work from developers on both the client and the server to make this work.

Added requires-fdroidserver-changes ui useability labels

Would users not opting in see the "popularity" too ? Or would there be an option to hide the bar ?

Some users won't like this feature or won't need it, this could save bandwidth and processing power server side to not provide this information to users not requiring it.

Also, how to handle outdated installs ? Should an user using year outdated version compared to latest version available be counter as valid to increase popularity ? Should it reduce the popularity because, potentially, the latest version got worse than the version users are keeping ? Should we have a per-version popularity ?

Per-version popularity sounds very complicated. I would start with a simple method to only report what apps in the repository have been installed through F-Droid. This would rule out apps bundled with the system or installed from other sources.

@Magissia: I would believe it would be best to show it to everyone by default, but add an option to hide it. The screen estate usage is minimal, though.

A proper(?) implementation would only let the server generate popularity statistics once a day or so, and add a "popularity: 0.8" (or different number) to each package, adding 1788 * 15 = ~27kb to the size of the package database. I feel this is negligible.

I think that we should just check the app name, and not installs. Having only a stat per-app keeps the UI simple and per-version popularity would not tell you well if the new version is worse, or if users are just too lazy to update, and may trick people into not updating when they should.

I hope that by "app name" you mean "app id" :)

Yes, it would track currently installed apps every X days, much like popcon in Debian. Tracking installs would be much more privacy intrusive and more complicated server-side (we'd have to track uninstalls too).

I indeed meant "app id".

Thanks for the clarification on what was on your mind, With the additional precision, i think it would be useful to have this feature, at least to know if the package is 'known' quickly

Sounds like a cool idea :)

mentioned in issue #491 (closed)

mentioned in issue fdroiddata#421 (closed)

mentioned in issue #722 (closed)

as mentioned in #722 (closed), I think it makes sense to have the popularity contest data that will track app installs, install failures, and uninstalls only. This would be transmitted to f-droid.org somehow that remains to be determined. Then this data can be used in conjuction with download count data to display to the user some kind of info about the popularity of an app.

@larjona I'll move the conversation here. pump.io is related to the discussion in #646, it could be used as a place for people to post app ratings and comments.

mentioned in issue fdroidserver#195

Milestone changed to %0.103 - UX Overhaul

Mentioned in issue fdroidserver#219 (closed)

mentioned in issue #646

changed milestone to %1.1

mentioned in issue #1042 (closed)

mentioned in issue admin#37