Education, by the numbers

Duolingo: Learn Languages has racked up 5,502,723 ratings. fly sky pty ltd, the publisher with the most apps in Education at 454, has only managed 7. Cranking out a pile of apps doesn't buy you trust with users. One good app does that instead. Pricing follows the same lopsided pattern: of the 117,755 tracked apps, 104,851 are free and 12,899 are paid, which works out to 89% free against 11% paid. Among the paid apps, prices stay cheap without swinging to extremes: 2,216 sit at $0.01-0.99, 4,058 at $1-2.99, 2,739 at $3-4.99, 2,008 at $5-9.99, and 1,878 at $10 or more. There's a tail of apps charging ten dollars and up, but it's tiny next to the flood of free listings.

Rating share in this category clusters around a handful of names, and the publishers pumping out the most apps are almost never the ones racking up ratings. Look at the top three by app count: fly sky pty ltd, YAUHEN BAHDANOVICH, and satoshi yoshida, with 454, 365, and 299 apps respectively. Combined, they hold less than 0.1% of all category ratings. YAUHEN BAHDANOVICH does better than the other two, pulling 4,157 ratings across those 365 apps, but measured against a category total of 74,772,934 ratings, that's basically nothing. satoshi yoshida's 299 apps have generated exactly 1 rating. Users have more or less ignored that publisher outright.

Look at the apps that actually pull ratings in bulk and you get a clear sense of what this category rewards, and it isn't polish for polish's sake. Duolingo and Quizlet: More than Flashcards (1,130,001 ratings) run on habit and repetition. ClassDojo (4,105,223) and Remind: School Communication (1,799,915) are the kind of infrastructure schools hand to students and staff, whether they love it or not. Canvas by Instructure (2,767,986) and 一起作业（原一起小学学生） (2,381,940) sit in that same institutional lane. Gauth: AI Study Companion (1,522,077) and PictureThis - Plant Identifier (1,119,068) break the pattern slightly, since they're pure utility tools people open for one specific need. None of these dress themselves up as games. Users reward whatever solves a recurring, structural problem, not whatever looks shiniest.

The median rating across rated apps lands at 4.5, which is high, and the median download size comes in at 49.3 MB, which is small. Put those two together and you get a category that doesn't need bulk to earn affection. The size breakdown backs this up: 59,402 apps sit under 50 MB and 48,891 sit between 50 and 200 MB, while only 2,084 apps weigh in at 500 MB or more. Bloated apps exist, sure, but they're a thin tail rather than the center of gravity. A 4.5 median rating next to a sub-50 MB median size tells you the apps winning here aren't winning by stacking on features. They win by staying useful and light.

Maintenance splits closer to even than I'd like to see. 70,390 of the 117,755 tracked apps shipped an update in the last 12 months. That's a majority, but it still leaves 47,365 apps untouched for at least a year, sitting right next to the ones getting real attention. For a category this size, stuffed with one-person operations and shovelware publishers racking up hundreds of listings apiece, a chunk of dormant inventory isn't surprising. It just means app count and recency tell you almost nothing about quality by themselves.

If you're picking an Education app from this data, skip the publisher's app count and look instead at who's actually built up real ratings. fly sky pty ltd's 454 apps against 7 ratings is a red flag, not a credential. The rating spread backs this up: 29,201 rated apps sit at 4.5 stars or higher, against just 5,941 below 3.0, so once you're looking at anything with a track record, outright bad apps are the exception. Price won't help you filter here either, since 89% of the category is free and the $10+ tier is a small slice at 1,878 apps. What actually separates the apps worth your time from the noise is ratings volume tied to a real institutional or habitual use case, the Duolingos and ClassDojos of the world. App count and price just won't do that work for you.