Android Usage for BooRah’s Restaurant Guide
Last week Google launch Android Market, the platform for developers to upload their applications to the T-Mobile G1 phone. We launched our restaurant search application into the Android Market, along with apps by 100’s of other developers.
After a week of settling down, we are pretty happy to find ourselves at the top of Lifestyle Category with about 20,000 downloads, 3.5 stars and 100+ ratings*. I’ve been analyzing our data since yesterday and have found some interesting aspects to share.
Geo-location & Searches
As expected, 3G coverage areas within T-Mobile network generated the most number of downloads. Here’s a map that we used to plot all the initial coordinates when phones downloaded our restaurant search application.
Thanks to Clusterer application which helped us map 10,000’s of coordinates on google maps to create this view.
The attached table shows the number of unique locations where users performed searches for local restaurants. These do not include searches by cuisine, keyword or location separately.
Downloads & Usage
Android Market continues to grow steadily, and we are seeing similar trends for our application. We are also pleasantly surprised by the number of reviews we have received from the phone compared to our website and consumers seem to find it very convenient to write a brief review while at the restaurant.
User Feedback & Issues
One of the biggest complaints we’ve received is on missing or closed restaurants. We’ve added user functionality to flag closed restaurants, and we plan to add a way for users to add new or missing restaurants – as well as working with new and existing sources to track down the latest restaurant information. Restaurants is one of the hardest hit industries due to the down economy and the convenience of updating such information is critical to managing it. We have received over 1000 updates on restaurants since launch. The street view that we’ve integrated into restaurant details also has raised some interesting questions about the accuracy of Google’s Street View data. The map coordinates seem to be accurate but the street view shows adjacent block view. Android also provides an easy way for users to communicate with the developers directly and we’ve received many emails with feedback and feature requests.
We are thrilled with the early success of Android platform and hope to release consumer requested features as soon as possible.
November 9th, 2008 at 11:58 am
[...] about to get quite a bit louder. Restaurant ratings guides are now getting tied to GPS locators, local directories, and social networks. A bad experience will be read about by hundreds of other people - at the [...]