"The new game is REDLINE: Longest Burn, an arena roguelite for Android. It is free, it works offline, and as of this writing almost nobody has played it. Discovery is my problem to solve this time."
As it will be for most software, imho. There's a limited suite of extremely popular software, and some locale-specific ones. Everything else is buried in a mountain of "the rest", where it's near-impossible to discover what's worth one's time (read: so >99.99% of potential users won't bother, and stick to well-known apps).
Logical consequence is that most of "the rest" turns into abandonware.
Big Tech's algorithms behind what's promoted on app stores, commercial interests, use of AI: all just make this worse. I don't see easy solutions to this problem. But if/when found, I suspect it'll be through community-run / grassroots efforts. "Monetization" otoh just turns everything to shit...
Author here. The downloads at the bottom of the page are the raw Play Console exports plus the merged monthly CSV the chart is drawn from. Happy to answer questions about either era.
"Same developer, same store, twelve years apart."
"Local brand, rebadged hardware, ethernet port on the back, internet features in the menu"
"Keeping the download tiny was a decision, not a side effect."
God I hate the AI slop that I can instantly call out. If you MUST have your blog written by AI, please please please please implement a skill or something that does a second pass using this https://tropes.fyi/tropes-md so at least we remove all the USUAL tells. I cannot stand to read articles like this any longer.
Fair, AI was in the loop. I'm not a native English speaker. I laid out what happened and in what order, and AI turned it into readable English. Nothing in it is hallucinated: every number comes from the raw Play Console exports at the bottom of the page. Without the tool people correct my grammar, with it they correct my style. Point taken though, I'll run the next one through your list.
And yes, this reply went through AI too.