It’s now been thirty days since the release of Lightning 1.0 beta1 and so far it’s been a blast.
Daily Lightning downloads
I regularly take a look at our download numbers and wanted to share some recent developments with you. First of all, let’s take a look at our daily download numbers since 2009-01-01:
What’s easy to see here is the huge reception that Lightning has gotten from our users since the 1.0 beta1 release. You can see it with the small spike in mid-December 2009 (announcement of the 1.0 beta1 release candidate) and the large spike 30 days ago, that marks the final release of 1.0 beta1. The corresponding moving averages show even better how much our daily download numbers have increased. To give some hard numbers: We’ve gotten more than 310,000 unique downloads within the last 30 days. That’s 50% more than we’ve gotten at any time since we measure our daily download numbers (which we do since September 2007).
I should add two things here:
- The regular downward spikes are the weekends and holidays, which always show much smaller numbers.
- The numbers only contain actual downloads. They do not contain add-on updates.
Lightning active daily users (ADU)
Another good indicator are our number of active daily users, which we’ve been measuring since late May 2009 and which can be tracked on a daily basis at addon.mozilla.org.
Again, it’s easy to see the steady upward trend that started around late August 2009. The downward spikes on every weekend are also easy to see, as are our low numbers around the year-end holidays, which seem to indicate, that Lightning is mostly used for business purposes and not so much for private use.
Thunderbird 3 adoption among Lightning users
Lastly, let’s take a look at what our users are actually using. How many people have already updated to Thunderbird 3?
The chart starts in late November with the first release candidate of Thunderbird 3 and it’s easy to see the first large increase on the day of the Thunderbird 3.0 release (December 08 2009). The release date of Lightning 1.0 beta1 (January 12 2010) is harder to spot here, but the uptake is still noticeable. What is pretty clear is the steady increase of Thunderbird 3 users and the corresponding decline of users of Thunderbird 2. Interestingly, the ratio of Thunderbird 3 users is much higher on the weekends compared to the Thunderbird 2 users. One possible explanation would be, that normal users , which also use Lightning during the weekend, are faster with upgrading than business users, which only use Lightning during the work week.
One interesting additional fact, that cannot be gleamed form those charts is the fact that Lightning users seem to be much more eager to update to Thunderbird 3, than Thunderbird users which do not use Lightning.
The last available numbers speak of a total of 6 million active daily users of Thunderbird during the week of which 1.4 million are already using Thunderbird 3. That would put the ratio of Lightning users at 15.5% overall (calculated with a value of 930,000 active daily Lightning users during the work week). However if you take a closer look at the various versions of Thunderbird, you can see that the ratio of Lightning users among Thunderbird 3 users is much higher (22.8%), while it is much lower among users of earlier Thunderbird versions (11.4%).
I’d be interested in your thoughts on this.
This is some real nice statistics which I would like to see on a regular basis.
Such stuff can make the community of lightning beta testers more eager to test and also arises a higher interest by press and companies.
And remember: “With great power comes great responsibility”
Keep on your great work.
Yeah, fascinating stuff. Thanks for putting this together!
I am a casual use in need of a scheduling system which Lightning excellent provider.
From my prospective there are two things that would be nice for Lightning.
1) I have a desktop and a laptop computer that are connected through a personal wireless internet. My wife is the principal user of the desktop and me the laptop. My wife is an artist who has art shows, paintout, and workshops that have to be scheduled. I have my own items that are scheduled. It would be nice to synchronize between the computers.
It would be nice to be able to synchronize the calendar,task, and events on the desktop and the laptop so we would have each other schedules
On the same line it would be nice to be able to synchronize the Lightning calendar to our Palm pda
What about a statistic of Lightning users vs. Sunbird users? Parallel trends would then show moves toward Calendar generally (or away from it, of course) while antiparallel trends might be indicative of users switching from one to the other.
Thanks for the great job you keep doing!
About interpreting those figures, I’m just doing the opposite of your interpretation:
[quote]
the ratio of Thunderbird 3 users is much higher on the weekends compared to the Thunderbird 2 users. One possible explanation would be, that normal users , which also use Lightning during the weekend, are faster with upgrading than business users, which only use Lightning during the work week.
One interesting additional fact, that cannot be gleamed form those charts is the fact that Lightning users seem to be much more eager to update to Thunderbird 3, than Thunderbird users which do not use Lightning.
[/quote]
I upgraded to TB 3 at home and use it on the evenings and during the week-ends, whereas at work, I’m still staying with TB 2 and Lightning 0.9 because I’m waiting for a stable release of Lightning 1.0 to upgrade.
That’s just because I consider my own personnal e-mail setup less risky and I can test more with it than with my professional one (-> I don’t want to lose time at work rooting out bugs or downgrading if something wrong happens).
I don’t know if my way of doing this is widespread or not :-) , but I would say that people using TB and Lightning together could be more on the professional side of things (as you implied) , but it means also they tend to be more careful with their software setups than at home, IMO.
I work as a consultant and yes there is considerable demand for lightning amongst business users, mostly small business, finalising lightning 1.0 is delaying upgrade from TB2 TO 3 on some client sites
I am a long time Thunderbird and calendar user. In many ways I prefer the separate Sunbird calendar, especially when we are talking about testing beta releases. I do not want to jeopardize my email program with beta software.
All in all, I look forward to Sunbird/Lightning 1.0 releases, it has been very long development time. Looking back I do not think the way Mozilla decided to organise and allocate resources was a good choice.
Very nice stats, Lightning is really a blast. More power and keep up the good work.