// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
From 13.5M installs to 499 active devices
Same developer, same store, twelve years apart. A million installs in 27 days in 2014, 493 views and no installs in 2026. Thirteen years of Play Console exports are at the bottom of this page.
On 21 September 2014 a game I made alone crossed a million installs. That was day 27 after release. The same day it was installed 173,975 times, which is still the biggest day anything of mine has ever had. I had no budget and no publisher, and I did not know a single person in the industry. I worked it out with common sense, one piece at a time.
At the end of July I released a new game and wrote a post about it in the most relevant place I could find. The post got 493 views and produced no installs at all.
The second attempt took more work than the first. Building is easier now, and AI is part of why. What has piled up is everything around the building: the forms and requirements and waiting you have to get through on Google Play before a single person sees the thing. And the return is not there. I do not mean the money. I mean the feeling of having got somewhere.
I have the export data for both ends of this, so here it is.
Early in 2013 I bought a TV. Local brand, rebadged hardware, ethernet port on the back, internet features in the menu. It came with the usual infrared remote. What did not exist was any way to control it from a phone.
Looking at it from my desktop I found that the TV was serving its own remote control as a web page on its own IP address. I read that page, watched what it sent when I pressed things, and wrote an Android app that sent the same requests. The TV was selling well here, so I put the app on the store to see what would happen.
People started installing it. First install 22 April 2013. It ended up at 774,898 device installs, and 105 devices still had it in June 2026.
That app is also where I found out what an ad is worth. I put a single AdMob banner in it, which was all there was at the time.
I built plenty of things after that and published none of them. Everything I actually wanted to make needed a backend, and I could not have covered the cost of one through any serious spike in users. If growth had come slowly it would have been manageable. It did not come slowly. So I turned the question around and went looking for something that needs nothing behind it. That meant games.