NuGet Package Explorer Update: 30k users, 22% not on Windows. One new feature!

24 Mar 2022

Last year our team contributed to the famous NuGet Package Explorer (NPE) open-source project by helping port its Windows-only application to Web using Uno Platform. The goal of the migration was to enable non-Windows users to also be able to use NPE on their preferred operating system. If you haven’t checked it out yet, please see https://NuGet.info

To measure how effective we were in reaching the goal, and to help evolve NPE better, we also hooked NPE to .NET Foundation’s Azure Subscription using Azure Static Web Apps and Azure Front Door—a fantastic example of how the .NET Foundation can help and support its member projects.

Today, 22% of developers using NuGet Package explorer are coming from non-Windows platforms (and from some surprising ones). Also, we discovered a new feature that needs enabling, which is what we are doing today too!

Usage Statistics

First, let’s look at the overall usage. The sample data is for the past 90 days to calculate weekly averages. We were incredibly happy to see nearly 30,000 Monthly Active Users for NPE!

Looking at telemetry, 22% of the users come from non-Windows operating systems – goal accomplished! An interesting insight is that even on Windows, a lot of users are opting for the Web option (93%) – likely the result of convenient one-click access to NuGet.info via nuget.org.

Browser-version wise, of the recognized/registered browsers it looks like a 81% – 19% split between Chrome and Edge. However, it is worth noticing that almost 40% of the browsers were not detected, therefore skewing this statistic by a lot.

Geo-Statistics

Top 5 countries user count wise were: USA (22%), India (8%), China (6%), Germany (6%) and UK (4%). Top 5 countries account for 46% of usage.

The above data also uncovers two additional new insights. First, a significant number of devs check out NPE on Web via mobile devices. To be exact, 6% are using Android which is more than using NPE on either Mac or Linux with 4% and 2% usage. Second, a significant number of Windows users still use Zip to download / install NPE. The downside of downloading a zip file, is losing the benefit of automatic updates if they were to use either chocolatey, Windows store or Web version – just something to consider if you are still using Zip/Download as your preferred NPE install method.

User Interactions

Looking at user interactions enabled by Azure Telemetry we spotted an easy opportunity to make NPE Web edition better. On the graph below you can see that it looks like most people are first viewing a package, then viewing some of the content/properties of the files. The web version of NPE does not have edit/publish capabilities right now, nor can it presently display the metadata XML. We considered at least exposing the XML metadata source view as the next natural step.

Today we are happy to announce a new feature has been added to NPE on Web.

Thanks to another contribution from our core team member, Xiaotian Gu, you will now have the ability to view the package metadata source; a feature that the Windows NPE had but NPE WebAssembly did not have up to now.

Conclusion

We will continue contributing to NuGet Package Explorer on the Web together with NPE core team and its community. After every Uno Platform release we will update NPE so it can benefit from the latest performance updates we are making, like in this PR.

We’d love to see NPE Web features come at parity with WPF Windows version. Based on telemetry we see – features being used more often are likely going to be ported sooner. And, we’d love to do it together with you, so come by NPE repo and participate please!

If this is your first time hearing of Uno Platform come by our GitHub Repo or try Uno Platform via our 3-minute step-by-step Getting Started tutorial.