As I described in the post yesterday the motives for changing the name of the Instapaper app back to something including the work “Instapaper” is very clear: Active user count.

It seems there is a constant leak of active users. This is very naturally when you think about it. Previously the app has been experiencing so many new users that the constant leak wasn’t visible – more new users where coming than leaving!

When the name changed to “InstaShare” it seemed that new users stopped coming. My guess is that they didn’t find the program when searching for “instapaper” on the Android Market. Immediately after changing it to “Read Later for Instapaper” the effect was clear. See the graph below. It shows active installs and starts at the first name change. The second name change is right where it starts to increase again:

I am changing the name of my Instapaper app to something else!

The reason for changing it the first time was to obey the rules of use of the Instapaper API. It was clear that the app could not be called Instapaper Poster – but changing it to “Insta-Share” was the worst mistake ever!

First of all the Android Market already had an app named “InstaShare”.

Second – when users search the Android Market they enter very specific keywords and usually get a long list of suggested apps. It seems that it is very important that the name include these keywords – in the case of this app the most common keyword is “instapaper” and if the program title does not include this word users will simply bypass the app.

This leads to the very obvious conclusion – change the name back to contain the word “Instapaper” – fortunately this can be done and still follow the rules of the API and everyone should be happy.

Later I will be posting some statistics on the name change. It is actually very impressive – stay tuned!