Food & Drink, by the numbers

Food & Drink is about as close to a pure free market as any app category gets. Out of 32,395 tracked apps, 31,593 cost nothing and only 799 charge for anything at all, a 97.5% to 2.5% split. There's barely room for a paid app to matter here. And the paid slice keeps thinning out as the price climbs: 260 apps land in the $0.01 to $0.99 range, 273 sit between $1 and $2.99, and once you cross $10, only 49 apps are left standing. Almost nobody in this category is actually selling an app. They're moving orders, and that's the entire business model in one number.

App count and rating share don't move together here, and this category shows the widest gap in the whole dataset. ChowNow publishes 213 apps but has only pulled in 51,241 ratings, under 0.1% of the category total. Per Diem Subscriptions, Inc. comes next with 155 apps and 35,265 ratings, also under 0.1%. RedoQ Software has 152 apps and just 3 ratings. TNX srl has 132 apps and 2 ratings. Pomegranate Technologies, Inc. and ORDER LLC round out the top six with 126 and 125 apps, pulling in 90 and 274 ratings respectively. Add it up and the top three publishers by app count hold less than 0.1% of all ratings in a category that has 152,204,830 of them total. These are white-label restaurant ordering shells, dozens of nearly identical apps built one per chain. People rate the restaurant, not the software quietly running things behind it.

The ratings pile up around delivery and convenience instead. DoorDash: Food, Grocery, More sits at 23,061,633 ratings, more than double Uber Eats: Food & Groceries' 10,703,897, and both leave every restaurant-ordering shell in the category in the dust. Starbucks (8,228,405 ratings) and McDonald's (7,798,903 ratings) show what one dominant chain app, backed by loyalty points and mobile order-ahead, can do: out-rate hundreds of smaller apps put together. Crumbl pulls in 5,649,072 ratings, proof that even a single-product bakery chain can land in that company. OpenTable's 5,585,491, Domino's Pizza USA's 4,980,958, and Instacart: Groceries & Food's 4,767,176 round out a leaderboard that has almost nothing to do with how many apps a publisher makes and everything to do with how often people actually open one.

Across 12,477 rated apps, the median rating comes in at 4.7, high for any category, while the median download size sits at 64.2 MB, nowhere near bloated. Together those two numbers describe a category that stays light without giving up on quality: 14,684 apps come in under 50 MB and 17,060 fall between 50 and 200 MB, while only 37 apps in the entire category cross 500 MB. Most Food & Drink apps handle one job, menus, ordering, maybe a loyalty card, and none of that needs much space to do well.

Maintenance holds up too. 20,038 of the 32,395 tracked apps shipped an update in the last 12 months, comfortably over half the category staying current. That fits a business where menus and prices shift constantly. An ordering app left untouched for a year starts showing the wrong numbers fast.

If you're picking an app here, publisher size is the wrong thing to trust. RedoQ Software's 152 apps against 3 ratings, or TNX srl's 132 apps against 2 ratings, show that a large footprint by app count can still mean almost nobody bothered to weigh in. The apps actually worth trusting are the ones with ratings in the millions, DoorDash, Uber Eats, Starbucks, because that kind of volume is the only real evidence people use them. And with 8,605 apps sitting at 4.5 stars or higher against just 1,281 below 3.0, a high rating alone doesn't tell you much in this category. Volume is what separates the real leaders from the shells.