Productivity, by the numbers

ChatGPT alone accounts for 9,866,612 ratings out of the category's 114,241,468 total, and that one number tells you more about Productivity than any app count ever could. The category runs almost entirely on free apps: 44,859 of the 49,239 tracked apps cost nothing, while only 4,375 charge anything, which works out to 8.9% paid against 91.1% free. Even that thin paid slice splits unevenly by price. Among apps that do charge, 1,139 land in the $0.01-0.99 range, 1,265 sit in $1-2.99, and 501 apps sit in the $10+ band, so real money still changes hands at the top end of an otherwise free category.

The publisher list explains a lot of this concentration. VBI Group LLC has shipped 201 apps in this category, more than any other publisher, yet those 201 apps combine for just 298 ratings, under 0.1% of the category's total. Rafael Machado's 99 apps have earned exactly 1 rating between them. Welyb's 78 apps, ACD Groupe's 75, and HubStrom's 72 have earned zero. Stack those top three publishers together and their app count still controls less than 0.1% of all ratings in Productivity. Only 20,571 of the 49,239 tracked apps carry any public rating at all, meaning more than half the catalog has never been rated by a single person. Publishing volume and earned trust clearly run on separate tracks, and almost nobody manages to win both.

Look at whoever actually wins the ratings game and one thing jumps out: nothing niche cracks the leaderboard. Microsoft Outlook (9,207,232 ratings), Google Drive (7,765,896), Yahoo Mail: Your Email & Inbox (4,798,974), Mail (4,420,436), HP (4,183,078), 豆包 - 随时帮忙的 AI 助手 (4,070,263), and Google Docs (3,218,086) all sit near ChatGPT at the top. Every single one is email, cloud storage, an AI assistant, or a device companion, the kind of app people open daily out of necessity rather than choice. These ratings reward whatever sits between someone and their inbox, not cleverness.

The median rating across rated apps is 4.5, and 11,053 apps sit at 4.5 stars or higher, so the top of Productivity is genuinely crowded rather than propped up by a handful of outliers. Only 2,792 apps fall below 3.0. Size tells a cleaner story too: the median download runs 29.6 MB, and of the 49,239 apps with a known size, 30,908 come in under 50 MB. Just 298 apps run 500 MB or more. This isn't a category weighed down by feature creep. Most Productivity apps stay small, and going by the rating spread, most stay decent too.

32,303 of the 49,239 apps shipped an update in the last 12 months, so roughly two-thirds of the catalog is still being actively maintained. That sounds fine until you remember the other third hasn't been touched in a year or more. Given how many of those idle apps probably belong to publishers like Welyb or ACD Groupe, both already sitting at zero ratings, abandonment here likely tracks publisher size far more than it tracks how hard this category actually is.

Anyone shopping for a Productivity app can take a few lessons from this. App count tells you nothing about quality; VBI Group's 201 apps and 298 ratings settle that on their own. Trust the names already carrying millions of ratings instead. ChatGPT, Outlook, Drive, and the rest got there because people use them constantly, not because of some marketing push. A paid option at $10 or more puts you in a small club too, just 501 apps in the whole category charge that much, making it the exception rather than the norm. Everything else is free and already proven out by millions of ratings.