Statistics Problem: 30% drop in Reported Sales vs. Native Amazon Appstore SDK User IDs since Feb 2026 [Case #21448194461]

Fire Devices & Appstore Q&A
1

Something is fundamentally broken with the Sales/Units Sold reporting pipeline since February 2026, and Amazon Developer Support is dismissing the issue without investigating the backend data.
We are seeing a massive, consistent discrepancy—at least 30% lower reported sales in our Developer Console compared to the unique Amazon User IDs recorded by our servers (specifically in the US/GB markets).

The Technical Reality:
We are not using 3rd-party marketing analytics. We are logging first-party data directly from the native Amazon Appstore SDK (UserData.getUserId()) upon first-time app initialization (only fresh and unique installs are tracked).
A consistent 30% drop-off between verified SDK user activations and the Developer Console’s reported billable units strongly indicates a synchronization failure in Amazon’s reporting pipeline. This represents a significant amount of missing royalties for developers contributing to the ecosystem.

The Support Roadblock:
I opened a formal dispute (Case: 21448194461) and provided the SDK logs alongside Amazon’s own CSV sales reports. Instead of escalating this to Engineering to cross-reference the SDK User IDs against internal transaction logs, Tier 1 Support closed the ticket with a macro stating they “cannot comment on 3rd party analytical tools.”

My Question to the Community and Amazon Moderators:
Is anyone else experiencing a 30%+ discrepancy between native SDK User IDs and Reported Sales since February?

Amazon Moderators: Since Tier 1 support is misidentifying native Amazon Appstore SDK data as “3rd party analytics,” can someone please escalate Case 21448194461 to the Appstore Backend Engineering or Finance team so the transaction logs can be properly audited?
Where is the missing 30% of SDK-verified traffic going each month, and why is it failing to trigger a Reporting/Royalty event?

2

Hi,

Thank you for reaching out. We wanted to clarify the discrepancy you’re seeing between your install numbers and the Sales Report figures.

Install counts and sales transactions are fundamentally different metrics. The Sales Report records only the initial purchase transaction for each customer, regardless of how many times they subsequently install the app. A customer who reinstalls the app — whether on the same device after a reset, or on a new/additional device — will generate a new install event each time, but only their original purchase appears in the Sales Report.

To give you an example: the user z4Dz9JKJuSHuJdYDfx7L3EysQ_5w8zTx6bpsGA3M5iI= appears in both your May and July audit reports for the same app ASIN — this represents two install events from a single purchase transaction, which is expected behavior.