From 13.5 million installs to 499 active devices | LE Games

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, no publisher and no press contacts. I was outside the industry and did not know the ecosystem at all. 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, not less. Building is easier now, and AI is part of why. What has piled up is everything around the building: the forms, the requirements, the waiting, the amount 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.

Monthly device installs for all three apps, from the first install in April 2013 to June 2026. Every point comes from the CSV linked at the bottom of this page.

The same three apps as numbers, in case you would rather read it than look at it.

AppFirst installLifetime installsBiggest monthPeak active devicesActive, Jun 2026

Shooting Expert 225 Aug 201413,559,9062,591,467886,208499<br>Shooting Expert: Target Range26 Sep 20132,186,594316,312141,763134<br>Fox TV remote22 Apr 2013774,89850,18816,989105

It started with a television

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.

Games, for an unromantic reason

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. What can I build that needs nothing behind it?

Games.

The first was a shooting range. One background photo, cut into four pieces so the phone's GPU could load it at all. One photo of a pistol. A white dot for the sight. Phones had almost no memory to spare and my own mobile plan was 325 MB a month. Keeping the download tiny was a decision, not a side effect. I wanted it to reach people who counted their megabytes, and back then that was most people. That game did 2,186,594 installs.

I should be clear that none of this fell on me. There was a stretch of about a year and a half where I worked at this constantly: trying things, watching which ones moved and which ones did not, and carrying what I learned into the next build. It was not a lottery ticket.

Shooting Expert 2

Google was pushing Google+ hard then, and a set of game services came with it: real time multiplayer, leaderboards, achievements. I wanted multiplayer in the first game, looked at how much would have to change, and built a second game around it instead.

It went out on 25 August 2014 and got 22 installs that day. Four weeks later it crossed a million users. October 2014 alone did 2,591,467 installs. By the end of that month it had passed five million.

I want to be exact about my own role here. There was no launch campaign. What existed was the Top New Free chart, sitting on the front page of the store, and once you were on it the store did the distribution for you. Getting onto it and staying on it was the part I worked at. My job was to have something people kept.

The multiplayer held through all of it. Google supplied the infrastructure, which is the only reason it survived that kind of load, but building it into the game was my work and it was not a small piece of work.

886,208 devices I was not allowed to sell anything to

On 3 November 2014 the game was installed on 886,208 active devices.

Until October 2021 it was not possible to open a Google merchant account from Serbia. No in-app purchases, no paid apps, no subscriptions. For the entire run, every one of those devices could only ever produce ad revenue.

At the peak that was roughly a solid US salary per month, which for one person in Belgrade with a laptop was a serious...