The difference between Active Device Installs and total installs on Google Play's stats (formerly Android market) is easily explained by users uninstalling. However I would expect the active device installs to equal to the total device installs less the total uninstalls. But looking at the daily device installs and uninstalls across several of my apps this does not seem to be the case.

What I'm seeing:

  1. Go to the stats page on Google Play export to CSV for an app
  2. Open in excel and create a column that is daily_device_installs - daily_device_uninstalls . This should be the net daily installs.
  3. Due to discrepancies in when data is sent you might not expect this column to equal the difference in active_device_installs between subsequent days. But over a long period of time, the difference in active installs should be close to the sum of the net installs columns. It's not.

In one extreme case over a couple of months the active_device_installs shows an increase of only 40k while the sum of the net installs is 100k.

Google Play help is not much use on this: http://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139628

Are others seeing the same thing? Which stat should we trust or am I missing something and tehy are consistent?

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