From 48 to 989: the month the flashlight was found

As of 3 September 2026. The source is the Google Play Console bulk reports, file
installs_com.pur.taschenlampe_<month>_country.csv, column "Daily User Installs". The
August report ends on the 21st.

The curve

• April 2026: 48
• May: 48
• June: 124
• July: 283
• August (1st to 21st): 989

That is 1,492 since April. For two months nothing moved at all, then the figure doubled
three times over. In April the app was installed in 36 countries; in August, in 121.

Why this is the better number

989 installs, 535 uninstalls, and on 21 August 692 devices with the app installed against
187 at the end of July. The base has almost quadrupled in three weeks.

A flashlight is installed once and then lies there until it is needed. That is exactly why
the gap between installs and installed base is small here — and exactly why it says more
than it would for an app you are meant to open every day.

What happened in between

The same reports produced the finding that set the work off: 30.2 per cent of installs
came from languages the app did not speak. Google Play ships to every country and
translates the store listing automatically; the app itself then fell back to English.

150 strings each were added in Arabic, Bengali, Amharic, Urdu and Persian. Right-to-left
was already in the manifest. The interface now covers 93 per cent of its installs instead
of 70.

The top countries in August read accordingly: India 132, Bangladesh 58, Germany 52,
the USA 41, Ethiopia 40, Iraq 40, Pakistan 38, Iran 35.

Along the way it turned out that eleven of the twelve existing translations showed a
hard-coded "Version 1.0.0" in the credits dialog: the %1$s placeholder had been replaced
by a fixed value during translation. That is fixed too.

Where to go next

See it on Google Play
or read the info page. What the app learned most recently is
in 1.0.8: one slider instead of four buttons.