I found that out this week. Then I found out I was wrong about why.
I only noticed it at all because I finally built something to read my own App Store numbers.
Looking at updates... I saw United Kingdom 195, and Thailand 327. What?
I was IN the UK at the time attending Wi-Co Fest in Manchester... and Thailand had more? I needed to know why.
I know exactly one person there. So I wrote to him and asked what had happened, and I will admit I was only really writing to confirm what I had already decided: he is well connected, he must have passed it around.
He told me it was not him.
It started with a Facebook post, from a training center I had never heard of, written by a man I have never met. The community shared it from there. In his words, their role was simply to share something useful, and this time it caught on.
Then he told me the part I keep turning over. In his country, people are far more active on Facebook than on LinkedIn. That is how things spread there.
I have spent years building an audience on LinkedIn. My second largest market reached itself on a platform I do not work, through a person I could not have named, in a language I do not read. Every instinct I have about how my work travels was shaped by the one platform I happen to live on.
Then I read what he actually wrote, in translation. He had grouped the tools into three jobs, led with the one question people really arrive with, and told readers what to reach for. It is a better guide to my own app than anything I have shipped with it, and a stranger wrote it for nothing.
Here is the comparison that finished the job.
There is a country in Europe where I know seventeen people from my own conference. Good engineers, several of them friends. That country has only 38 active installs.
The country where I knew one person, and where that one person turned out not to be the reason, has 327.
I would not have learned any of this from anything except my own numbers. I nearly did not learn it at all, because it was hiding in a column I had never bothered to look at. And the half that mattered most I learned by writing to somebody and asking him a question I thought I already knew the answer to.
Where is your work being used right now, on a platform you never check?