Shopping, by the numbers

QUKA YAZILIM SANAYI VE TICARET ANONIM SIRKETI put out 177 apps in Shopping and, across the whole lot, racked up just 3 ratings. That gap tells you most of what you need to know about this category: publishers keep cranking out apps, and users mostly ignore them. Pricing follows the same pattern. Out of 26,440 tracked apps, 26,208 are free and 231 are paid, which puts paid apps at 0.9% of the category. Break those 231 priced apps down by band and the numbers thin out quickly: 71 sit between $0.01 and $0.99, 103 land between $1 and $2.99, 33 fall between $3 and $4.99, 13 sit between $5 and $9.99, and 11 sit above $10. Hardly anyone pays upfront for a shopping app. The money moves after the sale, not at the download.

The ratings gap gets uglier once you dig into individual publishers. RAPID ACCELERATION INDIA PRIVATE LIMITED runs 111 apps and has pulled in 12,041 ratings, still less than 0.1% of the category total. MOBLIGO YAZILIM ANONIM SIRKETI runs 105 apps and has 16 ratings. CRESCE VENDAS TECNOLOGIA LTDA runs 93 apps and has 7 ratings. CommentSold Apps SII runs 89 apps and has 277 ratings. NBF Soluzioni Informatiche s.r.l. runs 83 apps and has 1 rating. Add up the top three publishers by app count and, combined, they hold under 0.1% of all 241,627,519 ratings in the category. Catalog size by itself tells you nothing about whether anyone's actually using the apps.

Look at who actually holds those ratings, though, and a different set of names shows up. Walmart: Shopping & Savings tops the list with 18,283,662, more than double whatever comes next. Amazon Shopping sits at 8,435,416, Fetch: Receipts for Gift Cards at 7,605,582, Etsy: Shop from Real People at 7,259,468, Walgreens at 7,203,373, Shop: Track, Pay, Discover at 7,111,450, Target: Shop. Style. Save. at 6,869,862, and フリマアプリはメルカリ - メルペイのスマホ決済でもっとお得 at 5,527,029. Every one of those is a retailer or a rewards app people already trusted before they ever downloaded it, not some clever shopping app dreamed up from nothing. People are rewarding a brand they already knew, not the app itself.

The median rating across the category sits at 4.7, with 7,330 rated apps clearing 4.5 stars or better against just 1,047 that fall below 3.0. Median download size comes in at 63.9 MB, and the size breakdown backs up that lean build: 12,149 apps stay under 50 MB, 13,460 fall between 50 and 200 MB, 794 land between 200 and 500 MB, and 37 run bigger than that. This category stays small on purpose. A shopping app is basically a catalog with a checkout bolted on, and most developers build it exactly that way.

16,446 of the 26,440 tracked apps got an update sometime in the last 12 months, so the majority are still being maintained. A sizable chunk hasn't been touched in over a year, which lines up with a category full of single-client storefronts that a developer built once and then walked away from. Given that 7,330 apps sit at 4.5 stars or higher, the ones still getting attention clearly aren't losing on quality. They're just hard to tell apart from one another.

Go by ratings, not by how big a publisher's catalog looks. A developer with 177 apps and 3 ratings, like QUKA, isn't necessarily running some kind of scam; a lot of these are white-label storefronts built for one retail client and never marketed past that. It does mean you're on your own when it comes to judging whether the thing actually works. The apps that racked up millions of ratings, Walmart at 18,283,662 and Amazon at 8,435,416 among them, got there by riding on a name you already trusted before you ever opened the App Store. In Shopping, recognizing the name beats the star rating, the file size, and the price tag every time.