One person, hundreds of thousands of Minecraft mods, 1.26M installs: the app is what grew, and the gate is in Google Play

mcmodshub.com (MC Mods Hub / MC Bedrock Mods for Minecraft) research report

Research date 2026-11-07. Data comes from our traffic / googleplay databases, the website (including robots.txt and llms.txt), the Google Play listing, and the founder's Reddit posts (read via RSS).

One line

A solo indie developer from Ukraine (Artem Lashkul, Reddit account u/Sufficient-Cup4705) built a Minecraft mod directory: the site turns hundreds of thousands of mods from CurseForge and Modrinth into indexable pages, then funnels traffic to 4 Android apps and 1 iOS apps. The main driver is the Android app "MC Bedrock Mods for Minecraft" (com.mcmodshub.app), listed on 2026-03-21, with 1.26M cumulative installs worldwide. Most of the traffic comes from the app, not the web. The rise in Tranco rank is mostly driven by backend domain lookups from app installs growing; the website itself only grew modestly.

1. Data: what actually grew

Why Tranco rose so much. The current Tranco list uses 5 data sources: crux, farsight, majestic, radar, and umbrella (traffic.tranco_list). Farsight, Cloudflare Radar, and Cisco Umbrella all measure DNS query volume. api.mcmodshub.com, files.mcmodshub.com, and the main domain resolve to the same set of Cloudflare IPs (per dig), and the app's directory API and image/file downloads all go through this registrable domain. Installs went from 50k in July to 1.26M in November, DNS query volume rose with them, and Tranco rose too. Over the same period, the CrUX global tier stayed flat at "top 1M," meaning web traffic itself grew only slightly. The card's flag "often the app backend" holds up here.

Web traffic itself. The only scale figures available are a few lines the site owner wrote in comments in robots.txt:

• 2026-08-12 the whole site gets 289,637 requests in a day, of which 72% come from AI training crawlers like meta-externalagent and GPTBot;
• "Bing sends us most of our search traffic": the Bing crawler makes 7,186 requests a day and brings 522 visitors; Googlebot rarely visits (it crawled only 294 times in 14.6 hours);
• "The ChatGPT channel brought 1,736 installs over three months (2026-09-05 tracking), making it the fastest-growing install source," which is why the owner built llms.txt.

At these volumes, the website gets only a few thousand real human visitors a day, a small contributor to 1.26M installs.

2. Competitors

This niche is the oldest and most crowded "Minecraft mod app" business on Google Play, mostly made in bulk by white-label studios.

(Installs from googleplay.app_profile 11-07, Tranco from traffic.rank_day 11-01)

Key finding. At least 8 new apps in this niche reached one million installs within a year; mcmodshub ranks 5 (in the googleplay database, apps listed within 365 days, with Minecraft/MCPE in the title and 300k+ installs: 14 total). In other words, demand for searches like "minecraft mods" on Google Play is very large, mainly from kids in Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines, and Indonesia, and new apps with decent quality can get a share. mcmodshub's growth rate is not standout in this niche (7 days +65k; Verity +176k).

3. Growth tactics (where users come from)

1. Frequent self-promotional Reddit posts (confirmed, the early main channel). u/Sufficient-Cup4705 posted roughly 50 times from 2026-04-09 to 10-24, almost 2–3 posts a week, in r/MCPE, r/minecraftbedrock, r/SideProject, r/IndieDev, r/fabricmc, r/CurseForge, r/ModdedMinecraft, r/MCPEMods and more, including Portuguese posts ("o brasil é um dos países que mais usa mods no bedrock") and Ukrainian posts. Links carry UTM parameters, for example utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=sideproject. The formula is: "I'm a developer + my kid is finding mods on sketchy sites + looking for feedback + link in the comments."
   • The story and numbers don't match. The family member is sometimes a cousin, sometimes a nephew, a kid brother, or my kid; 5-30's posts say 17,000 users, then 6-05 says 1,700; one May post claims 12k installs and "a few YouTubers mentioned it unprompted," another says 8k; "hit 50k installs" and 7-19's "50k bedrock" repeat each other 8-29. The posts also say "free, no ads," but the app shows rewarded ads. Another post, "decent anime wallpaper app I've been using," doesn't disclose it's the developer's own app, and is likely a funnel for PixWall. Taken together, this looks like a batch of promotional posts, possibly rewritten with AI.
   • Founder's own account: "Reddit has been my best acquisition channel by far" and "brought maybe 60% of my installs" (referring to the 17k-user stage).
2. Google Play store search and charts (inferred as the main channel during the scale-up phase, with no direct evidence). From late August to late October, installs rose by about 1.1M. A Reddit post with a few dozen to a few hundred upvotes can't explain that scale. The visible levers are:
   • A rating of 4.85, the highest in the niche; competitors are typically 4.1–4.6.
   • It is listed under GAME_CASUAL (Casual Games), while competitors are mostly in TOOLS / ENTERTAINMENT. That lets it into the Casual Games Top Free chart in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and the Philippines, ranking 120–190, which gives it an extra chart exposure. These four countries are exactly the ones entering CrUX's top tiers.
   • The title is packed with keywords (MC Bedrock Mods for Minecraft / MCPE); the founder says "store listing matters more than I thought," and conversion went up after rewriting the screenshots and description.
   • It has 26,287 ratings but only 259 written reviews (1.0%), suggesting most ratings come from the in-app rating prompt and may include incentivized reviews. Note: competitor Lyxoto is 0.5% and Verity is 0.2%, which is normal for mod apps, so this alone is not proof of rating manipulation.
3. Programmatic SEO on the site funneling to the app (confirmed, small volume). The sitemap includes 360k Java and 54k Bedrock mod pages, plus multilingual install tutorials, troubleshooting pages (such as "Unable to find manifest in pack"), and Top 20 list blogs. Every page links to Play with utm_source=mcmodshub_web. The main search source is Bing (per robots.txt comments).
4. LLM / ChatGPT recommendations (confirmed, self-reported by the site owner). 1,736 installs over three months; the owner wrote llms.txt, letting AI search crawlers in while blocking training crawlers.
5. YouTube creators mentioning it unprompted (unverified). Only appears in one Reddit post.
6. Paid acquisition (not found). Our ad library does not track this domain (the card's ads field is empty), but that doesn't mean they didn't spend. The download-time rewarded ads monetization can fully support Google App Campaign buys, which is the biggest unknown.

4. Why it took off

• Demand side: Installing mods on Bedrock on a phone is a hassle. Traditional channels are sites like 9minecraft, full of fake download buttons, and .mcpack/.mcaddon files must be imported manually. The main users are kids in Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines, and Indonesia (the countries newly entering CrUX and the chart countries). This demand has always existed; it is not new.
• Supply side: No need to create content yourself. Connect directly to the public APIs of CurseForge and Modrinth, and one person can build a directory of "hundreds of thousands of mods."
• Retention / monetization: One-click download, and after downloading the file is handed off automatically to Minecraft for import. Rewarded ads are shown at the moment of download, when user intent is strongest; the founder says conversion has been "surprisingly well."
• Scaling: The first 50k installs were pushed hard through Reddit. After that, a high rating, the casual games category, and keyword titles created a positive loop into Google Play search and charts (inferred).

5. Differentiation

Compared with the veteran mod app factories, it differs in these ways:

• It only aggregates real works from CurseForge/Modrinth and does not repackage files of unknown origin. This plays to a "safety" narrative, repeated throughout the Reddit posts.
• Opened 46k mod archives, parsed the manifest, can point out which dependency is missing, whether it's just a texture pack or just a behavior pack, and wrote those up as troubleshooting content.
• Built five apps on the same base: Bedrock, Java, skins, wallpapers, and iOS. The website serves as the main entry point, and they ran two versions.
• It has its own mods (the Gloamer series) and a "Setups" bundle pack.

Is this what made it take off? Mostly not. Same-age apps like Verity, Horror Hub, and Furniture Mods are single-theme white-label apps without any of these differentiators, yet they got more installs. What actually worked was a higher rating (4.85) plus choosing the less crowded casual games category. "Safe, from official sources" was mainly Reddit promo copy that helped it win its first users early. The website and LLM work is very detailed, but the install numbers it shows are in the thousands, not the source of this growth.

6. How many people have seen it

• No public revenue (no TrustMRR listing, the founder only said AdMob "covers hosting"), no media coverage, and x-radar finds no hits for the domain in the last 90 days. Searching mcmodshub on TikTok returns 0.
• Its only exposure is Reddit posts the founder made himself, so it counts as "spreading within a small circle."
• Copycats: I haven't seen anyone specifically copying it. But this niche is already crowded with mod app factories, and a new million-install app shows up every year.

7. Takeaways

1. Host the app's backend under the website domain. When app installs go up, Tranco/DNS rank goes up with them. Conversely, anyone analyzing this must not treat a Tranco climb as website traffic.
2. In the large, established Google Play category, raising the rating and switching to a less competitive category gets you chart exposure directly. mcmodshub chose GAME_CASUAL instead of TOOLS.
3. Put rewarded ads at the moment users are about to get something.
4. Cold start with a Reddit posting matrix. Multiple subreddits, multiple languages, persona backstories, links placed in comments, tagged with UTM. It works, but the narrative is inconsistent across posts, and there's a risk of being exposed.
5. Website playbook: programmatic SEO aimed at Bing; an llms.txt to attract ChatGPT recommendations; blocking training crawlers while keeping AI search crawlers that send people in; and turning "facts from opening and parsing files" into content AI is willing to cite. The whole setup is very detailed and worth copying.

8. Still unclear

• Where the roughly 1.1M installs from late August to late October actually came from: whether it ran Google App Campaigns, whether it was pushed by Play editors' recommendations or "similar apps," and whether there were YouTube/TikTok creator videos (none found on TikTok search).
• The install numbers in the Reddit posts contradict each other, so the real install count from 7 to August is uncertain. All we know is that 10-29 it had already reached 1.16M.
• Whether it prompts for good reviews (filtering in the rating dialog) cannot be confirmed.
• Copyright risk: it redistributes CurseForge files and images, and the authors receive no download revenue share. CurseForge's API terms restrict third-party distribution, so there is a takedown risk (specific terms not verified).
• No revenue data at all.

Sources

• Website mcmodshub.com/, mcmodshub.com/robots.txt (traffic, crawlers, Bing, and ChatGPT install data are in the comments), mcmodshub.com/llms.txt, mcmodshub.com/sitemap-mods.xml
• Google Play: com.mcmodshub.app (1M+), com.mcmodshub.jav (100K+), com.mcmodshub.skinmaker (10K+)
• iTunes lookup id6809487321 (Addonaut, listed on 2026-09-25)
• Reddit: www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/1v0mvkm/ (2026-07-19, "50k installs on bedrock"), www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/1w1jh2f/ (2026-08-29), www.reddit.com/r/minecraftbedrock/comments/1u3p4me/ (2026-06-12), www.reddit.com/user/Sufficient-Cup4705/submitted/ (about 50 posts, from 2026-04-09 to 10-24)
• Our database: traffic (rank_day, crux_domain, tranco_list), googleplay (app_profile, app_day, app_snap, chart_rank, app), queried on 2026-11-07