Google March 17 added an application statistics dashboard to help software developers gauge the installation performance of programs offered in the Android Market.
Available in the main listings page of the Market Developer Console, the dashboard summarizes each application’s current download numbers, as well as each application’s distribution across Android platform versions, devices, countries and languages.
The dashboard also shows aggregate distribution for all application installs from Android Market, giving developers an idea about how their applications play relative to the rest of Market.
Ideally, this information will give developers the insight they need to tune their “development and marketing,” said Eric Chu from Google’s Android Developer Ecosystem.
The application stats dashboard, which will be updated daily, starts with data retroactive to last December 22.
Chu also promised his team would deliver more reporting features to help Android developers manage applications they seed in the Android Market.
The application stats dashboard comes long after Google released a device dashboard that charts the percentage of Android handsets that are running each build of the platform.
This helps developers decide what iterations of the Android operating system their applications should support. For example, the current device dashboard (which is updated every two weeks) shows Android 2.2 comprises 61 percent of platform devices. Android 2.1 is next at 29 percent.
The dashboards represent pieces of a broader trend for Google to sculpt the Android Market into a respectable platform ecosystem that developers will want to go to as an open-source alternative to Apple’s iOS and iTunes App Store.
While possessing more stringent rules, Apple’s App Store offers a lot of perks for developers, including better distribution, monetization options and, yes, metrics.
To better compete with Apple, Google in the last several months has stepped up its efforts, adding application payment in more countries and carrier billing options, redesigning the Market client, adding content ratings and creating a separate Android Market Webstore.