News, by the numbers

Money barely enters the picture here. Just 204 of the 13,831 tracked News apps charge anything at all, which puts paid apps at 1.5% of the category against a free share of 98.5%. The price bands make the picture even stranger: 65 apps sit in the $0.01 to $0.99 tier, 55 land between $1 and $2.99, 46 sit in the $3 to $4.99 range, and only 6 climb above $10. Nobody's building a premium news product here. Free access is simply the default, which lines up with how people actually consume news: the money gets made after the download, inside the app, not at the point of entry. A price tag in this category tells you about distribution strategy, not quality.

Ratings paint a completely different picture of who actually leads. Gray Television Group, Inc. tops the app-count leaderboard with 139 titles, but those apps have only pulled in 295,558 ratings combined, a mere 0.7% of the category's 43,983,203 total. Gannett's 133 apps fare similarly, carrying 134,691 ratings, or 0.3% of the total, and even stacking the top three publishers together barely nudges past 1% of all ratings in the category. apicodo GmbH has pushed out 84 apps and collected exactly zero ratings, under 0.1% of the total. Cranking out dozens of local or franchise apps might get you near the top of the app-count list, but it doesn't buy you an audience.

The apps people actually reward look nothing like that publisher roster. X alone racks up 10,990,246 ratings, more than the next several leaders put together. Reddit trails at 3,491,911, 今日头条 sits at 2,810,393, and Nextdoor: Neighborhood Network follows at 2,137,841. CNN: Live & Breaking News holds 1,664,079, Apple News comes in at 1,623,643, and SmartNews: Breaking News lands at 928,739. Barely any of these qualify as single-publisher news outlets in the traditional sense. People are rating the platforms where news gets discussed, aggregated, or shoved into a feed. That's where this category's real weight lives, and it has nothing to do with app count.

Quality across the board holds up well. The median rating comes in at 4.6, with 4,037 rated apps at 4.5 stars or higher against only 858 sitting below 3.0. Size tells a cleaner story than most categories manage: the median download size is 44.8 MB, and among apps with known size, 8,592 stay under 50 MB while 5,002 fall between 50 and 200 MB. Only 7 apps in the entire category weigh 500 MB or more. News apps stay light because most of them are really just text, images, and a feed, nowhere near the demands of a game engine.

Maintenance looks solid overall: 8,721 of the 13,831 tracked apps have shipped an update in the last 12 months, comfortably over half the category. That still leaves several thousand apps that haven't touched their code in a year or longer, and in a category built around breaking-news delivery and dependable notifications, ending up with one of those is a real gamble.

Anyone picking a News app should ignore the price tag entirely; it tells you nothing in a category that's 98.5% free. Rating volume and update recency matter far more, and the gap there is massive, running from X's 10,990,246 ratings all the way down to publishers like Bonnier News Local AB sitting at just 55. The biggest rating totals don't go to the publishers with the most listings. They go to the apps people actually opened today.