Downloads and Updates Report

Last December Pandion 2.6 was made available for download from the official website. Before that only a handful of brave testers were using the development builds.

The overwhelming majority of users are still running Pandion 2.5, released over four years ago, and probably oblivious to the recent rebirth of the project. But Pandion 2.6 is stable enough for release so soon all Pandion 2.5 users will receive an update notification.

I collected data on the last two months of Pandion 2.6 distribution. Three accurate data sources are available:

1. FeedBurner: Number of daily users and auto-updates.
   The Pandion 2.6 update mechanism polls an Atom feed proxied by FeedBurner. This service provides detailed statistics on the number of users ("Subscribers"), as well as their Pandion version and language setting by parsing the User-Agent HTTP header.
2. Google Analytics: Website visitors and downloads.
   The pandion.im website contains a Google Analytics tracking cookie and a custom hook to track manual downloads of the Pandion installer. These downloads are served directly by the pandion.im web server and do not add to the download count of the SourceForge data.
3. SourceForge: Auto-update downloads.
   When a new version of Pandion is available all clients automatically download it from the SourceForge content delivery network. Occasionally someone will manually visit this page to download a development build but this is likely negligible.

So what does it add up to?

Blue: Usage is climbing at a high rate, week after week. This is a good sign! The weekend dips indicate that Pandion is used in many professional environments.

Red: The spikes are updates of stable builds. The huge majority of users is on the stable update track. The beta and development tracks are much less popular but important nonetheless. Making it easy for testers to try beta and development builds has helped us find and fix many bugs.

Blue: Download traffic is stable. Combined with the usage growth shown above this implies that people continue using Pandion rather than just downloading, trying and uninstalling. Again a good sign.

This graph is a little deceptive. The Y-axis scale is logarithmic. And the X-axis shows version numbers, not dates.

So this graph shows that 2.6.70 and 2.6.86 are orders of magnitude more popular than any other version. That is because they are both the stable builds. What's interesting is that 2.6.86 reached the same number of auto-updates in a few days as 2.6.70 reached in about two months.

Conclusion

This provides a little insight into Pandion 2.6 usage and a point of reference for future growth. I would like to automate this data collection and analysis. Having a live graph of our progress towards world domination would be fun and motivating.