We’re back with some new milestones thanks to the continued growth of Flathub as an app store and the incredible work of both our largely volunteer team and our growing app developer community:
- 70% of the most popular apps are verified
- 100+ curated quality apps
- 4 million active users
- Over 2 billion downloads
How does it measure weekly active users? Does it keep track of who runs the application? And how does this account for distro hoppers and QA testers?
I’m not 100% on the details, it’s hard to find good documentation on this, but here’s my understanding.
Every machine with snap install has an ID associated with it. Whenever snap refresh is run, a list of installed apps is sent back to Canonical so that Canonical can fetch updates. But they also use that list is also used for generating metrics. Users aren’t double counted because of the unique ID associated with the install. So Canonical just needs to keep track of all the IDs in the last week who’ve checked for updates and count them up. That final number is then shown to maintainers of the snap.
Snap isn’t checking if you actually open the snap though. It’s just counting people who have the app installed.
But isn’t that the same as Flatpak’s “X clients download updates”-metric?
How to they associate that with the user or the machine? Rather than the amount of snapd clients/OS’s with snapd on it? (as to not count one person with two Linuxes double, which Flatpak does)