Google Play shows "1,000,000,000+". The exact counter sits behind that band, and Google overwrites it every day. AppCurves reads it every night for every app on a Play chart — 203 markets, 54 categories, Top Free, Paid and Grossing — and keeps every reading. Free, no account.
Hi PH — I'm the one person behind this.
Every Google Play listing carries an exact install counter in its page data, but the store only ever shows a rounded band: "1,000,000,000+". And it overwrites that exact figure every day — nobody keeps yesterday's.
Since Aug 4 I've been reading that counter once a night and never throwing a reading away. The base is Google's own charts: every app that appears on a Top Free, Top Paid or Top Grossing chart in any of 203 markets, across all 54 categories, gets read — plus any app you look up or follow. That's the whole product: the number behind the band, and how it moves.
What it is not, so nobody is surprised: – Not an estimate. Nothing is modelled. The figure is Google's own, copied from the listing, with the date we took it. – No per-country downloads. Google doesn't publish them, so nobody honestly has them. Per-country chart positions, yes — 203 markets nightly. – No iOS. Apple publishes no counter. – It will not match your Play Console. Those are different measurements and Google publishes no mapping — the FAQ says so up front.
Reading is free with no account. Following an app puts it in the nightly queue. Pro ($9/mo) adds a morning mail on days something moved, 100 follows, and an API with every reading.
The most useful thing you can do: pick an app you know and tell me if the number looks wrong. Every reading is kept, so I can check it against what we recorded that night.