What changed

Nov 2, 2026

• New: how often Google Play updates its download counter — 90 nights of readings across 114,000+ apps, the September pause when no counter moved for three nights, and the raw data as a CSV.

Oct 4, 2026

• New: the 100 most downloaded Android apps, ranked by the exact Google Play counter rather than the store's rounded band, with what each added in the last day.
• New: how to see how many downloads an app has — what the Play Store shows, where the exact number lives, why Play Console disagrees, and why iPhone apps have no public figure.
• What changed now reads without JavaScript too, like the rest of the site.

Sep 20, 2026

• The homepage no longer jumps while it loads. The comparison, the hero card and the movers list used to appear a moment after the page and push everything below them down; each now takes its final space from the first frame. Lighthouse's layout-shift score on desktop went from 0.32 to 0.00.
• Every page now reads without JavaScript. The homepage, Pro, Questions, About, the API docs, every market page, every category page and every chart now arrive as real HTML — heading, text, numbers and links — before any script runs. Until today those pages were a title and nothing else to anything that doesn't run JavaScript, which includes the AI assistants that fetch a page on your behalf; they were reading our homepage hundreds of times a month and getting 68 characters back.
• Pro and the API docs are in the sitemap, along with the market and category indexes. A comment in the sitemap code had been swallowing those four entries since August.
• `/contact` works — it goes to the contact section of About. A market we don't scan, or a category that doesn't exist, now answers with a real 404 instead of an empty page.
• Search engines that support IndexNow (Bing, DuckDuckGo) are told what changed every night. Google isn't among them; that side still runs through Search Console.

Aug 30, 2026

• The counter now owns a full line. On desktop the app page leads with the exact number across the whole card — the chart and Follow moved below it. No digit count can crowd it any more.
• The nightly chart gained a y-axis, every rank-history day is now a plotted dot instead of a filled block, and a market count that never changed is stated in one sentence instead of drawn as a fake trend.
• Site watermarks came off every on-page chart, and the homepage now opens with what you get — "The exact download count for any Android app."

Aug 29, 2026

• AppCurves is now printed on paper, not glass. The whole site moved to a light, archival look — ink on paper, one highlighter. Every app page opens with an evidence card: the store's rounded band struck through, the exact counter beneath it, and tonight's change marked in yellow. The card carries its own provenance — when it was updated, where it came from — and a ready-made citation line you can copy with one click.
• The main chart now shows what was added each night, not the total. A cumulative line on a lifetime counter is nearly straight; the story is in the nightly additions. Nights we didn't get a reading appear as hatched placeholders, and a night the counter held is a solid tick at zero — the two can't be confused.
• Every reading is a table row again — night, counter as updated, and what it added — open by default, with tonight highlighted.

Aug 28, 2026

• A new coat of paint, properly this time. The page now has three real depths — content sits on a panel, charts sink into a darker recess — instead of everything floating on the same black. The signal colour is a teal all its own (the old blue was Google Play's blue — a page about Play's counter shouldn't wear the store's colour), and it means exactly one thing: this is the subject. The green "growth" block is gone; a day's gain is just a figure under a hairline. Sentences are set in a real text face; the monospace voice now belongs to numbers alone.
• A day the counter doesn't move is now said plainly. Play's own counter sometimes rests a day and catches up the next. Those days now read "No change since Aug 27" — never "+0" — and sit on the curve at the same height as the day before. Days we didn't read look deliberately different, so the two can't be confused.
• The same chart no longer appears twice on an app page. One curve above the fold; the full history below is described ("24 readings held since Aug 4 — the latest 7 are drawn above") rather than redrawn behind a lock.

Aug 24, 2026

• Search now recognises our own links. Pasting `whatsapp-messenger` — the exact slug in every share link, every `.md` twin, and the examples in `llms.txt` — found nothing. All four forms work: name, package, slug, and a Play Store URL.
• Fixes reach the site immediately. Deploys were not clearing the edge cache, so a correction could take up to an hour to become visible even though it was live. Daily readings were never affected — that path always cleared it.
• The numbers move now. A counter rolls from yesterday's reading to today's — and only the digits that actually changed roll, because the animation is replaying a real day, not pretending data is streaming in. Curves draw in the order the readings were taken, the newest reading keeps a slow halo, and the rank lanes light up night by night as you scroll (scroll back and they rewind). Tapping a search result carries its number into the app page.
• Every animation in the design system was missing. They had never once run in production — a stylesheet import was in the wrong place and the whole motion layer was being dropped at build time. It is back, and the page background now has the soft glow it was always designed to have.
• App names in every list are no longer cut off. On phones, the country chart was giving names 74 pixels and the numbers 156, so "KashKick: Get paid to have fun" showed as "KashKick…". All three lists — charts, movers, country — now use one row: rank, icon, the full name, and that list's own figures underneath. The movers list also gets back the running total, so a "+4.6M" can be read against the size it landed on.
• The page is darker and quieter, so the only lit things are the counter and the most recent reading.
• Less repetition throughout. Sentences explaining what a chart already showed, method notes repeated on every page, and figures stated two or three times are gone. Nothing about how the data is gathered or where it is missing was removed.

Aug 21, 2026

• (internal) Conversion funnel instrumentation. The site now records — without any personal data — when a sign-in wall is shown, when checkout is opened, and which campaign or referrer first brought an account, surviving the OAuth round trip. Until today no one could say which channel produced a given subscription.
• The app page stopped selling and started showing. Follow now appears exactly once — a quiet button beside the counter — instead of a glowing card, a second pitch section and a banner. Compare moved up to right after the reading history: if you came for one number, the next thing you want is a second number, not an offer.
• Rank history is now an actual history. A lane chart shows every rank the app held day by day (a flat record reads as steadiness, not missing data), bars show how many of the 203 markets it charted in each day — the quantity that actually moves — and its best market gets a day-by-day strip where a missed reading says so instead of pretending to be rank zero.
• The listing facts shrank to one line (version, store-page date, store link) — the rating, best rank and release date already live next to the counter, and saying them twice helped nobody. The "apps within ±20%" list is gone: two counters being coincidentally close is not a relationship.
• On phones, Follow now closes the answer — a full-width button right under the counter it follows, where it used to be a screen and a half down. Designed, not squeezed in.
• The Pro page opens with the decision on phones: "Follow 100 apps instead of 5", the price, and one button. The full Free/Pro cards stay below, in their original order — the $0 row is the baseline that makes $9 legible. "Stay on Free" is a real exit.
• Screens 360px and narrower get a proper menu — wordmark, search and a menu button at full size, with the navigation in a drawer. Nothing shrinks; the row wasn't tight, it was overloaded.
• The movers page now ships its three boards as real HTML — with real links — so search engines finally see the site's freshest page instead of an empty shell.
• Signing in with Google after signing in by email now lands on the same account. Previously the two routes could split into two accounts — and a Pro purchase could end up stranded on the one you could no longer reach. Existing accounts are matched by verified email. The Follow, Save-comparison and Pro walls also offer the email-link option now, not just Google.
• A failed payment can no longer be silently lost. If our webhook handler fails, Stripe now retries instead of being told everything went fine.
• Search no longer says "no match" while it is still searching. Three separate reviews caught the same half-second lie; there is now a real "searching…" state. Results also show the exact figure instead of "49.3M".
• Phones down to 320px wide no longer scroll sideways — six page types did.
• Picking a second app for a comparison now lands you at the top of the comparison, not somewhere in the middle of the page where the old screen happened to be scrolled.
• The Pro page leads with Pro on phones, checkout failures now say so instead of silently snapping back, and the yearly button says what it does ("Start Pro yearly — $79"). The comparison-size row was corrected from 8 to 10 apps.
• On phones, Follow is now next to the number it follows instead of a screen and a half below it.
• App icons load 27× smaller — chart pages were shipping 3MB of 512px icons into 34px slots.
• A single-app "comparison" link now takes you to that app's page instead of a blank screen.
• The privacy page no longer discloses Google Fonts (fonts have been self-hosted since Aug 17), and the machine-readable site description no longer claims there is no paywall — Pro exists and funds the collection.

Aug 20, 2026

• Google stopped publishing ratings on many listings, and we say so. Around half the apps we read no longer show a star rating on their public Play page (verified in a real browser — the header shows only downloads and Install). Where that happened, the app page and the `.md` twin now show the last published rating with its own date instead of presenting it under today's date, or say "not published" if there never was one. We record what Google publishes; when Google withdraws a field, the record says that rather than pretending.
• The app page answers on one screen now. On desktop the first screen is three columns, in reading order: the exact counter with its rating, best chart position and release date on the left; the last seven readings drawn as a curve in the middle — so the curve the site is named after no longer hides below the fold; Follow on the right. Phones and tablets keep the previous layout. The counter sizes itself to fit on one line: an 11-digit figure like YouTube's steps down rather than wrapping.
• Charts pages were returning "not found" to search engines while looking perfectly normal to you. The nightly chart scan takes an hour, and during it the site only recognised the handful of markets it had reached so far — for the rest of the day, `/charts/us` and most other markets answered 404. Fixed, and the acceptance suite now checks that real pages answer 200, which it never did before.
• The site got faster. Two things the server recomputed on every single request — the market count in the footer and the whole movers board — are now worked out once a day. They were costing 3.3 and 1.5 seconds of server time each, and because the database is read synchronously, those seconds stalled *everybody's* requests, not just the one asking.
• A question for developers: why our figure will not match your Play Console. They are different measurements, Google publishes no conversion between them, and anyone offering you one is modelling.
• Archive movers pages no longer flash "What moved yesterday" before the day loads.
• Removed a claim we should never have made. Comparison pages said things like "117% more than the store shows". Google Play says `1,000,000,000+` — that statement is *true*, it is a floor, not a guess. Presenting our figure as a percentage above it implied Google was wrong by 117%, and comparing that percentage between two apps compared nothing at all: it only reflected where each app happened to sit inside its own band. The line and the bar that drew it are gone. "Play says 1,000,000,000+", printed above the exact figure, already said everything true here.
• Comparison pages now keep one order. The title, the app slots, the readout cards and the chart legend all follow the order in the link. Previously the cards and legend silently re-sorted by size, so the app on the left of the picker was the app on the right of the cards.
• The growth chart's end labels now match its axis. In "Growth %" the flag showed absolute downloads next to a percentage scale.
• A flat day now says what it is flat since — "no change since Aug 19" — instead of "no change" sitting above a curve that is visibly climbing over the week.
• The homepage counted today honestly. During the nightly run it showed yesterday's finished total under the words "so far today". It now shows the real running count.
• Chart axes use one precision. "5.264M" and "5.23M" no longer appear on the same axis.
• On phones, the Top free / grossing / paid switch is no longer cut off, and the homepage no longer has two search boxes.

Aug 19, 2026

• Search now finds what you are looking for. Typing the first letters of a well-known app returns that app, and pasting a Play Store link works.
• The daily numbers are on the page. Under every curve, a table of each day's exact figure and what it added — with `held` where Google's own counter did not move, so a flat day never reads as a missing one.
• Fixed sideways scrolling on phones, on every page, and three summary cards on market pages that were partly off-screen.
• Every app page is now in the sitemap — all 309,186 of them, not the first 20,000.
• App pages rebuilt around one question. The answer, then the proof, then one offer — and the page is designed to be finished with after the curve. Ranks became one line of context instead of a section.
• Release dates repaired. A collector change erased the release date on ~19,000 apps whose Play listing does not publish one; all of them are restored, and the collector no longer overwrites a known date with a blank reading.
• App pages now open with the app's identity. Maker under the name, then one band carrying category, release date, rating and package name — the fields that answer "is this the app I meant" before any figure appears. The maker's name was missing from the page entirely until today.
• Questions. Ten questions people actually ask, starting with how to check our numbers against Google Play yourself. It replaces the old page about how we collect.
• App pages cut to one action and four lines. The counter, what it added and between which two days, the curve, and where it ranks. Everything that explained a mechanism is gone.
• Homepage says what you get, not what we do.

Aug 18, 2026

• Charts. Any market × any category × Top Free / Top Grossing / Top New, with the exact install counter and yesterday's change beside each rank. Duplicate charts are named as duplicates rather than presented as separate markets.
• Apps past 500,000 installs are now read every night — the threshold used to be 100 million, which left visible holes in mid-size apps' curves.
• Followed apps are collected first. The nightly queue used to be unordered, so a followed app could be read three hours in.
• Market names on an app page link to that market's chart, and every market at a given rank is listed instead of the first six.

Aug 17, 2026

• Pro daily report. A morning email of what your followed counters added, silent on days nothing moved.
• Follow limits: 5 free, 100 on Pro. A followed app's curve runs from the day you follow it.

Aug 16, 2026

• Pro is live — $9/mo or $79/yr. Daily report, same-day crossing alerts, 100 follows, unlimited saved comparisons, CSV of every reading.
• Badges. A live SVG of any app's exact counter for your README, at `/badge/<slug>`.
• Sign in with an email link, if you would rather not use Google.

Aug 15, 2026

• Weekly digest of your followed apps, off by default.
• Movers by date — `/movers/2026-08-15` and neighbours, so a day's board stays quotable.
• Category pages for every Play category: ranked by exact installs, plus the day's gainers inside the category.

Aug 14, 2026

• Country pages — who climbed, entered and left each market's Top Free chart yesterday.

Aug 4, 2026

• Collection began. Nothing on this site predates this day, and nothing ever will — Google keeps no history of the counter.