650+ Downloads, 300+ Active Installs, and 8 Votes of Support. Time to Suspend Development?
[This body of this post was updated on the at 08:45 GMT - 28th Feb 10 with the latest statistics]
When we entered the PayPal X Developers Challenge we hoped for a good result (who doesn’t when they enter a competition?). After the problems we saw with the way it’s being run we decided to use the number of votes we received to determine what to do with the project in the future. Now we’re wondering if PortaPayments has a future at all.
We’re currently just over 1/3rd of the way through the PayPal X Developer Challenge voting period and our stats are bad… really bad. At the time of writing PayPals site shows over 2,600 registered users, nearly 2,100 votes have been cast, and PortaPayments has got 8 votes (9 including ours, and yes, developers can vote on their own project).
That means that other than our own vote we’ve secured less than 0.4% of the votes, which by anyones measure isn’t a sign of a popular idea. To put this another way, if all the votes were spread evenly over all of the projects you’d expect to see around 38 votes for each project, which is more than four and a half times the amount PortaPayments currently has.
We accept that a few of things could affect this, for example;
- PR - Some projects may have large established user communities, or may be benefiting from being focused on altruistic goals such as charitable donations which always appeal to people.
- Similar projects - We’re aware of 3 other projects which use visual representations and scanning. Unfortunately, unlike PortaPayments, the other 3 don’t have a fully functioning scanning application, but as PayPal have ignored that part of their rules, we’re now competing against 3 incomplete projects for votes supporting the same concept.
- The single vote rule - Some users may like PortaPayments, just not as much as another entry, yet they only get one vote and so have no way of showing support for PortaPayments as well as the other entry.
But the fact remains that we currently have less than a quarter of “average” expected vote, less that 3% of active users have voted to support the project (and yes, we did include a link to how to vote in the app), and just over 1% of the users who’ve tried the app have voted for it, and to us that’s a pretty clear sign the project isn’t worth actively developing, but we’d like to know what you think!
Update: We’ve been asked for details of the other 3 incomplete projects. They are D836- Scan n Pay, D837- offline paypal payments, and D942- Payment Plus