Health & Fitness, by the numbers

Free is basically the default in Health & Fitness. Of the 11,751 apps tracked, 9,800 don't cost a thing, which shakes out to an 83.4% to 16.6% split in favor of free. Whatever paid apps exist stay cheap: 556 sit between $0.01 and $0.99, and another 688 fall in the $1 to $2.99 range, more than every higher price tier combined. Only 101 apps charge $10 or more. Paying for a health app here reads more like a small impulse purchase than a ticket into some premium subscription tier. The actual money gets made after install, once a user's already committed.

Oddly, the publishers with the fattest catalogs barely register in the ratings. Stefan Roobol, YMAA Publication Center, Inc., and Perfect Gym Solutions Sp. z o.o. each have roughly fifty apps to their name, and not one of them breaks 0.1% of category ratings. Momence, Inc. and Geisler Young put out the most apps of anyone, and they still top out around 0.1% each. Even if you stack the top three publishers by app count together, you're only at 0.1% of the category's 54,701,466 total ratings. Cranking out more apps just doesn't translate into attention here. App count tells you almost nothing about who's actually winning in Health & Fitness.

Meanwhile, a few standout apps outdraw those bloated catalogs on their own. WeightWatchers Program (2,357,116 ratings) and MyFitnessPal: Calorie Counter (2,349,257 ratings) each pull in more ratings solo than the top three app-count publishers manage combined. Calm (1,969,719), Flo Cycle & Period Tracker (1,934,673), and Motivation - Daily quotes (1,063,670) fill out the rest of a leaderboard that's really just a list of hits. With the category median rating at 4.7, the takeaway is hard to miss: what sticks in Health & Fitness is a small set of apps people actually love, not publishers stuffing the store with extra listings.