So, we're reviewing the data from our Glastonbury app and it's thrown up a few surprises which I thought I'd share here.
The overall download numbers were excellent. We've had over 100,000 so far across iPhone, Android and Qt; and we were featured in the editorial sections of all three app stores. We smashed through the targets Orange set us; and, having been briefed by Orange at the start that they wanted to reach beyond festival-goers, we were very pleased to notice the many reviews and tweets from users who downloaded and used the app without ever making it to Somerset.
As I've mentioned before, we knew that battery life and connectivity are at a premium for festival-goers, so we put a lot of work into ensuring the app could work offline. If it could get a connection, it'd use it to check for line-up changes and news, but if it couldn't, the app would still work.
This means that we can't track usage of the app directly by looking at connections to the line-up-serving back-end. But we think we can see relative interest over time. Here's a graph of traffic to the app over the month around the festival:
You can clearly see peaks in the individual afternoons, then a huge spike when the full artist line-up is released, and mounting excitement as the festival approaches. Friday night is our highest ever traffic, but Saturday and Sunday don't exhibit the kind of tail-off I had expected from dwindling batteries and ever-more-careful use of mobiles. It looks like those chill'n'charge tents got some heavy use :)
Other surprises? We could see twice as much per-user activity from Android users as from iPhone owners, although overall iOS downloads were about 4 times higher. Both of these surprised me: I'd have expected activity to be roughly equivalent, and there to have been more Android downloads given the growth of the platform over the last few years.
And on the fluffier end of things, we were touched by the number of people who returned to their app store after the event to leave a post-mortem review. That's really sweet; almost as sweet as reading tweets like this one, from several users who became quite emotional at the thought of deleting our little app:
Update: a great comment from Ged Byrne (see below) had me looking into traffic by platform over time... and noticing that Android users are slightly more active in general, but their activity dropped off over the four days of the festival much more slowly than that of Android users. I'd agree with Ged that this is down to Androiders being able to change batteries (a suggestion from the office was that they might be more accustomed to killing apps and reducing battery drain too).
Interesting split between Android and iPhone. Presumably there was nothing different in the offline implementations? Otherwise, perhaps Android's user base is geekier and hence more app-aware?
Posted by: BenedictEvans | July 11, 2011 at 11:10 AM
No, the implementations were consistent.
It's weird; if the explanation for increased activity was geekiness, I'd expect the number of downloads to be at least equal to iPhone (there being many Android owners of geekish nature). Haven't got a theory to explain it yet...
Posted by: Tom Hume | July 11, 2011 at 11:15 AM
What, if anything, could you do to keep people using the app after the festival? Possibly outside the scope of the brief; but could you make it help people cope with their Glasto come-down?
Posted by: Terence Eden | July 11, 2011 at 11:22 AM
Terence: oh, you could do a *lot* I think. From personal experience, the week after getting back from Glastonbury is mostly spent looking out of the nearest window, wishing one was still in a field.
So as well as the obvious (links to BBC iPlayer for acts you wish you'd seen, actually saw, etc), how about something akin to PhotoJojo - a week after getting back, you're emailed photos of the acts you saw and loved, exactly to the minute after you were standing in the mud dancing to them? Or take your personal route across glasto (gathered from wanderings) and overlay it on your home town - encourage people to retread their steps and recreate the festival, psychogeographic style?
Posted by: Tom Hume | July 11, 2011 at 01:05 PM
Android users can swap batteries.
Posted by: Ged Byrne | July 11, 2011 at 07:07 PM
Ged: I think you've hit the nail on the head. I just went back over the data and calculated how many connections to our server we had, per day, by platform - and related these to the total downloads per platform.
Over the 4 days 25-28 June, iOS went from 0.7 syncs/download to 0.14 syncs/download. Android went from 0.95 syncs/download to 0.48 syncs/download. So whilst Android users are still slightly more active in general, as time goes on their activity drops off much more slowly that iOS folks.
Thanks for pointing that out.
Posted by: Tom Hume | July 12, 2011 at 10:28 AM