ShopSavvy Doing Amazingly Well on the Android Market

ShopSavvy must be one of the best-known applications for Android, Google’s mobile operating system that we have seen debuting on the first phone – aptly named T-Mobile G1. The guys from Big in Japan, the company behind ShopSavvy, have built the application exclusively for Android platform. After winning Android Developer Challenge, the application has been widely discussed everywhere and the huge promotion supported by Google (a representative of the company was even present at the G1 phone event in New York) was supposed to help boost the application’s growth a lot. I have spoken to Big In Japan co-founder Alexander Muse about their first days on the Adroid Market and thought the results were definitely more than impressive and worth sharing with our audience.

First of all, for those of you uninitiated, ShopSavvy is the barcode scanning application which seems to be the most popular on the Android Market for now. To me ShopSavvy seems to be one of the most useful applications on the marketplace as well as it offers real-life value to the phone owners. Basically what ShopSavvy does is helping you find the best deals for a product you consider buying – both online and offline.

A user simply scans the barcode of the product using the camera of an Android-powered phone (for now it is T-Mobile G1 only, obviously) and the application will start scanning available pricing information. Once the scanning is done, the user gets information from both online stores and from nearby local stores (using the GPS functionality).

Right from the application you can either visit the website of an online store selling the product you are interested in while for a local store you can easily dial their phone number or view a map to get the directions. What’s more, you can even track the products you are interested in for the best possible bargains by setting alerts for ShopSavvy to notify you when the product makes an appearance in a store for a desired price.

The first Android Market day started for the ShopSavvy guys on Tuesday with a surprise when they realized their application had been removed along with a bunch of other apps (there were only 13 left out of more than 50). After that they found out the reason was not in Google deliberately removing the applications from the marketplace for some unknown reason (or censorship as was the initial thought in the blogosphere) – it was simply the fact that Android Market was upgraded to the version that welcomed the initial G1 phone owners yesterday and all the developers were supposed to submit the final versions of the applications on time which many of them failed to do. Judging by Alexander’s comments, developers were not the only ones to blame as Google seemed not to be explicit enough as to what the developers should expect if the applications were not submitted on time.

Anyway by the lunch time on Tuesday ShopSavvy was back to the Android Market and available for downloads to all those happy people who received their gadgets ahead of time because of the pleasant surprise T-Mobile prepared for its subscribers. And while it was still one day before the official T-Mobile G1 shipping date and debut of the Android Store, ShopSavvy quickly became the most popular application on the Android marketplace. Alexander told me:

By 2 p.m. we had 3096 installs and 3033 users actively scanning barcodes (97% usage rate). I can tell you usage is growing 20% an hour based on our server loads.

Yesterday, when the Android Market was officially launched, ShopSavvy received over 10 thousand more downloads and the guys were happy to report this fact on their blog. But they also had an unpleasant surprise with the marketplace: yesterday evening they decided to upgrade the application to a new version with some bug fixes and new features introduced but this erased all the ratings and reviews the application received from users during the first two days of usage. This must be noted by all the application developers as absence of reviews will damage their rankings and will make it more difficult for potential users to discover the applications. Also I hope this is something Google plans to have fixed with the Android Market as of course upgrades will happen and punishing applications like this is definitely not something they should want to do given the fact that the quality control of the marketplace is crowdsourced to G1 phone owners.

Of course it is understandable that ShopSavvy will hardly remain the all-time leader on the Android Market with applications for MySpace and Facebook launched at some point but anyway I wanted to congratulate the guys from ShopSavvy with a successful launch on the Android Market as it definitely demonstrates how a clever and useful idea combined with good promotion can ensure impressive growth for an application and I do hope Google will fix the Android Market soon enough not to disappoint developers any further.

Here is the video describing how ShopSavvy works: