It looks like March turned out to be the month of Android! Earlier this month we rolled out support for developers outside of the U.S, we started tracking hourly Android ranks from 16 new countries, and added support for sub-user access to Google Play. To close the month, we have even more good news for Android developers.

Google recently overhauled its reporting system for free Android apps. Included in those changes were exportable CSV reports–something we’ve been waiting a long time for.

Today we’re happy to announce improved reports for free Android apps:

• Downloads by country, making the By Country report fully functional for all Android apps.
• Updates, just like iOS and Mac apps.
• Accessible historic data. That’s right, we can now get daily downloads data.
  * We discovered that Google won’t return daily data before 11/27/2011, even for apps that have been on the store for longer.

So, if your Google Play account is currently linked and you have auto import activated we’ve already got all of your available data imported and ready to go. If you haven’t linked your Google Play account yet, now is a good time do just that.

As you know we started tracking apps from the Android Market (now Google Play) about 3 months ago. Shortly after, we began finding out that some of our members from outside the U.S. were having trouble syncing their market accounts with appFigures.

It turns out that when our servers, which are located in the U.S., attempt to extract data from Google accounts originating from outside the U.S., Google tends to ask for extra verification to prevent unauthorized access. The problem is that we don’t know exactly what sort of extra information will be required ahead of time, and we don’t want to ask you for any more information about your account than the bare minimum required (the account credentials).

This turned out to be a pretty challenging issue to solve. Sure, we could find some hacky work around, but we wanted to do it right. We put a lot of time into creating a secure and reliable solution. Here’s how it works:

Next time you add a Google account to appFigures and our servers recognize that Google is asking for further verification, a verification window will pop up. There you’ll be able to complete the verification step with Google directly, after which we’ll attempt to import your data.

If you add a Google account and no further verification is required, you’ll never see that popup and everything will work as usual. Easy.

So if you’re outside the U.S. and have been having issues connecting your Google account with your appFigures account, now is a good time to try again.

Although we’ve been testing the new verification system rigorously, there are certainly a few more rough edges left to smooth out. So for now we slapped a ‘beta’ label on it. Please contact us if you experience any issues or have questions.

Since we started appFigures three years ago it’s matured quite a bit, growing from a small side project into the largest app tracking platform out there.

As our user-base has grown we’ve watched the platform become a sort of standard for sharing app data between different teams and with third parties. Folks who want to share their apps with colleagues set them up as sub users, and third party services use the appFigures API to make sharing data with them easy.

While these are great ways to collaborate, we realized that most members could use an easier way to share, one that doesn’t require the obligation of adding a sub user or writing code to hook up with the API.

So today I’m excited to introduce the new app sharing feature.

Very simply, you can now let other appFigures members view your apps alongside their own. You can choose the specific apps and date range to share, and even set an expiration date.

We designed it to be secure and really easy to use. It’s now a breeze to share your apps with colleagues, publishers, promoters, investors, and even your grammie. We can’t wait to see how people use it.

Here’s how it works:

There’s a new section in the ‘Account’ page called Sharing:

There you can manage what you’re sharing and what others are sharing with you.

To get started create a new share group:

You can choose a specific set of apps to share, or check the ‘Share all products’ option and the list will always be updated with newly added apps.

To invite someone to a share group add their personal email address to the list. They’ll get an invitation to see your data in their appFigures account (if they have multiple accounts they’ll be able to choose which one they want to use). If they don’t have an appFigures account we’ll invite them to join.

That’s about all there is to it. You can read all the details over on the FAQ.

So give it a try. We love your feedback so please leave a comment here or contact us directly.