that_leaflet , 6 hours ago (edited 6 hours ago)

I wonder how inflated that 4 million active user number is. They say it’s measured by “count[ing] the number of updates to that runtime we’ve served between two releases”. But that method doesn’t account for people distrohopping/reinstalling or QA testing by distros.

I maintain a snap package and something I really like about the Snap Store is the metrics they give. Note that this data is aggregated, I can’t see anything specific about a user. I am able to see:

• weekly active users
• distro and version
• CPU architecture
• country
• which version of app
• which channel (stable, beta, edge, etc)

But Flathub only measures total downloads. An app could get a thousand downloads and those thousand people could immediately uninstall the app and you would have no way of knowing that. With snap, you would see a week later a drop off of a thousand users.