Education, by the numbers

Duolingo alone has racked up 5,418,781 ratings in Education, more than the top six publishers by app count could match even if you pooled every review they've ever collected. A handful of apps carry this category while tens of thousands of others sit on the margins, barely touched. Education leans hard toward free: of the 105,458 tracked apps, 93,425 cost nothing and 12,028 charge something, working out to 11.4% paid against 88.6% free. The paid bands hold a surprise, though. The $10+ tier holds 1,838 apps, almost matching the 2,014 apps sitting in the $0.01-0.99 range. So the paid side of this category splits into two camps: throwaway pricing on one end, and apps betting they're worth a real purchase on the other.

Ratings concentration here is stark. fly sky pty ltd has 430 apps and 4 ratings total. satoshi yoshida has 277 apps and zero ratings. Exam Prep OU, with 269 apps, has pulled in 5,271 ratings, still less than 0.1% of the category's 72,201,827 ratings. Together, the top three publishers by app count hold less than 0.1% of all ratings in Education. The gap between how many apps a publisher ships and how many ratings it earns tells the real story: a small set of apps people actually used drives this category, not prolific publishers. Publishing a lot of apps means almost nothing on its own.

The leaders here get rewarded for habit and infrastructure, not novelty. Duolingo's 5,418,781 ratings and ClassDojo's 4,021,877 point to apps that people, or their schools, come back to every day. Canvas by Instructure (2,768,139) and Remind: School Communication (1,786,443) aren't flashy. They're the plumbing schools run on, rated by users who had no real choice but to use them constantly. Gauth: AI Study Companion, at 1,470,540, and Quizlet, at 1,108,300, show there's still room for study tools to grow. PictureThis, a plant identifier with 1,111,302 ratings sitting in an education category, is a good reminder that the App Store's category labels are looser than they look.

The median rating across rated apps is 4.5, with 26,507 apps sitting at 4.5 stars or higher against 5,442 below 3.0. Most surviving, rated apps in this category are genuinely liked, not just tolerated. The median download size is 49.3 MB, and the size distribution backs that up: 52,992 apps come in under 50 MB and another 43,740 sit between 50 and 200 MB, so most Education apps stay lean rather than bloated. Only 1,958 apps cross 500 MB. Feature creep hasn't weighed this category down.

62,026 of the 105,458 tracked apps shipped an update in the last 12 months, leaving a large share of the category unmaintained. That lines up with what the publisher numbers already suggested: a lot of these apps got pushed out once, then abandoned. Many belong to publishers with app counts in the hundreds and ratings near zero, so the pattern tracks. Mass-published apps just don't get the ongoing care that something like Duolingo or Canvas gets.

If you're picking an app in this category, the numbers point toward chasing rating volume rather than app count or price. An app from a publisher with hundreds of listings and single-digit ratings is a red flag, not proof of scale. And a $10+ price tag doesn't mean more care went into it than a sub-dollar app either, since the pricing bands split rather than sort by quality. Sustained use is what separates the winners here: apps that rack up millions of ratings and keep a recent update log, not apps with a big catalog sitting behind the name on the App Store page.