ShopSavvy Breaks 100,000 on WP7

ShopSavvy is ranked NO. 1 in the Tools category and between NO. 20 and NO. 30 overall in the Windows Phone 7 market. Since December ShopSavvy has been downloaded 105,878 times. We estimate about 10% of Windows Phone 7 users have ShopSavvy on their phones compared with 13% of ALL smartphone users (we are on a much higher percentage of iOS and Android devices).

ShopSavvy Hits 51,102+ Downloads Per Day!

Our friends at AppFigures decided to include downloads from Android market alongside Apples market so for the first time we have a fairly universal view of our daily downloads. According to them we had more than 51,102 downloads yesterday we assume this is an all time record for ShopSavvy. Of course the 50,102 number does NOT include downloads we get form alternative markets perhaps 20% of our Android users come from these secondary app markets.

HTC Thunderbolt OTA Fix!

According to HTC, their latest update will fix almost all of the Thunderbolts various problems except LTE. We are not sure if this will prevent ShopSavvy from crashing on the device, but we are hopeful. Please take a minute to update your phone and see if ShopSavvy is working (if it is let us know).

What it takes to rank in the Windows Phone 7 Market

Ever wonder what it takes to rank in the top No. 25 Overall or No. 1 in the Tools category in the Windows Phone 7 App Market? ShopSavvy is currently No. 1 in Tools and No. 22 Overall (we have been as high as 14 overall). We are even beating Google! Here are the particulars:

- 800 downloads per day on average (top day was 3,172)

- 72,881 cumulative downloads

The WP7 version of the app is handicapped by Microsofts camera policies, but we have high hopes they will open up the camera to developers soon.

How many servers does it take to run ShopSavvy

More than 7.5 million smartphone owners use document scanning app iphone to scan barcodes when they shop. With each scan our users check-in at a retail location giving us valuable location data so that we can deliver them relevant deals to help them save money. Some of our users are adding product data including product pictures (more than 2 pictures a minute) and product pricing (more than 10 additions a minute). Each month our users scan millions of barcodes requiring us to deliver a LOT of information (product info, product reviews, local prices/inventory and online prices) back to them billions of pieces of data in the course of a month. During the course of the year it takes about 20 servers (not including development servers) to keep everything running.

- 3 PriceNark 4 API servers

- 2 PriceNark 3.2 servers

- 1 Image server

- 1 Rails box (running AdOns and misc API endpoints)

- 1 Tomcat box (running misc backend API endpoints)

- 1 Database (MySQL) server

- 1 Database (MySQL read replica) server

- 3 Chalupa servers (barcode decoding)

- 6 Cluster servers (Hadoop/Cassandra/HDFS)

- 1 WordPress (shopsavvy-mobi)

During new releases or during special deals we sometimes need to spin up new instances of PriceNark and Chalupa. During Christmas we double all of these server counts to deal with the increased shopping traffic. We also leverage Amazons cloud for redundancy we can run completely in the EC2 cloud or on our own servers.