It looks like our Chemistry and Physics app has found its audience in beautiful Peru:
The app went from 200 users in total to 8,000 new installs every day (and counting) in a matter of weeks. At the time of writing it stands a little bit over 132,000 active installs.
Here are some early learnings:
1. It did not come overnight: the app has been around for a while;
2. Timing: a free solution that works without internet access does wonders when millions of kids are sent home because of lockdown and a lot of them realize that they can’t follow distance learning;
3. Location: these new users are almost all based in Peru. It will be interesting to see if it extends to neighbouring countries;
4. Luck! We suspect that the app has been included in some local learning toolkit. We did not push for it, nor have we seen anything pointing at it. But we were lucky that the right someone(s) found out about the app on their own, and that they were a powerful prescriptor. Protip: good SEO/playstore wording does help “luck”.
This particular app was based on the University of Colorado’s PhET Chemistry and Physics games. The Kiwix technology allows us to package any existing content into a standalone app. The Wikimed medical encyclopedia is another successful example. We have a couple of other candidates in the pipeline -starting with an offline dictionary: stay tuned!