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Almenon
Almenon

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AREPL Stats 2021

See last post for 2019 here

Q: AREPL?

Automatic-read-eval-print-loop. It's a real-time python scratchpad, currently one of the top python extensions for VSCode.

Q: How many people use AREPL now?

Roughly 400 daily. Usage is around 530 on weekdays and 350 on weekends. This is FAR more than the previous number (~100). I'm not sure when or how the increased happened, because the number of weekly users is flat currently and I don't have enough historical data. This is very frustrating. A definitive increase in users would prove that AREPL is a good app and my time spent making it was worth it. Without a definitive increase I'm left to question the stats and and whether people truly like AREPL. But I suppose I'm being pessimistic here, I should be celebrating the massive increase. sad toot 🎉

Q: What portion of users are using AREPL for the first time?

Users of AREPL by first use date

This is a graph of people who used AREPL yesterday, sorted by the first use date, the y-axis being total number of uses. As you can by the number of bars on the right, many users just started using AREPL recently. Specifically, 245, or 54%. Then 21 users started yesterday, 11 the day before that, 10, 3, 3, 3, and so on. Basically half the users are new with a long tail towards the left of repeated users.

I have two takeaways:

  1. A very large number of users quit using AREPL right after trying it out. If I take the average number of daily users in the left tail as retained users, and the number of people using AREPL yesterday as new users, then 3/245 = 1% retention rate.
  2. I have repeated users!

#2 is great news because repeated uses of my app indicates that it's more than just a novelty - it's something that can actually be useful in day-to-day development or learning. At least for the 1% of retained users, but better something than nothing!

Q: Did you get any media mentions?
6 blog posts, 1 tweet, and 6 videos.

Q: So you have some stats, but what do users actually think?

Good question. Currently I'm feeling that statistics, while easy to collect, are not giving me the entire picture. Unfortunately user interviews are easier said than done. I've sent out multiple requests but I've hardly gotten any responses.

Some final notes:

Q: Where do I install AREPL?
A: https://github.com/Almenon/AREPL-vscode

Q: How can I add application insights to my own extension?
https://medium.com/@almenon214/adding-telemetry-to-your-vscode-extension-f3d52d2e573c

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