I just realized that the Marketplace now displays installation numbers for Forge apps. That’s great!
But I also realized that the number displayed on the Marketplace does not correlate with what I’m able to see on developer.atlassian.com and when calling forge uninstall. To be specific, for my forge app I get the following numbers:
forge uninstall: ~50
Marketplace: ~80
Developer Console: ~100
Which one should I trust now? How do they correlate? Why do they differ by such large amounts? How many people have actually installed my app now? Would love to understand more about this.
That’s best for Atlassian to answer of course, and I’ve been about to ask about the following observation for quite a while, but at least it partially explains the difference for us:
Apparently depending on whether or not your app requires user permissions, any installation into Jira or Confluence also seems to trigger an installation into the Identity product, so this means there might be two product installs in the console for one app install in the Marketplace.
you can see the Identity product alongside your resp. Jira or Confluence installs in the developer console (‘Distribution’ => ‘Installations’ tab), and via the forge install:list command
Now, this isn’t an exact science yet and resulting edge cases have contributed to our first and so far only Forge incident, for example:
adding permissions in later releases requires users to upgrade, and those who do will gain the Identity product and thus count for two installs (in the console), but those who are still out of date count as one
removing permissions conversely does not automatically uninstall that Identity product yet (once again distorting the installation count in the console), which I assume is an edge case or bug (not sure whether it actually should, my current impression is that it would be better/safer if permissions and thus the Identity product are always required so that there is a stable environment)
I can’t explain the lower number you are seeing for forge:uninstall though (or forge install:list to show the Identity product separately), for us these are identical to the developer console (if we properly account for Identity installs)
It would be great if the Atlassian team could chime in to clarify those Identity product peculiarities, as evidenced here it is at least confusing, and as described even a potential source for hard to diagnose edge cases!
Thanks @sopel ! This gives me some first hints to better understand what’s going on. I’m tempted to mark your answer as a solution but I also want an answer from Atlassian, so not going to do that just yet.
@sopel’s response is pretty spot on in regards to Identity installations.
To summaries what each installation count shows:
forge uninstall - showing filtered installations (no Identity) from both Marketplace and non-Marketplace.
Marketplace - showing unfiltered installations (including Identity) but only from Marketplace.
Developer Console - showing unfiltered installations (including Identity) from both marketplace and non-Marketplace.
I’m now working with the team to bring more consistency here, mainly considering only showing one installation per site on all three counts by adding filtration to Marketplace and Developer Console. This way permissions wouldn’t impact the primary installation counts. What are your thought on this? Can you think of any reason you’d want to see a mix of product (Confluence/Jira) and Identity installation?
No. For me, the installation count is mostly interesting because I want to know how many sites have installed my app (i.e. how many customers I have). So, one install per site is exactly what I want to see.
