App Store Data Studies
Original research from our own index of the App Store. Each study takes a real question, computes the answer across tens of thousands of apps, and explains what it means — no guesswork, no invented numbers.
These are not opinion pieces or roundups. Every figure below is computed directly from the App Store metadata we track and refreshes as the data does. Where a finding touches one of our live record boards or tools, we link straight to it so you can dig into the underlying apps yourself.
What tens of thousands of apps reveal about who pays, how much, and where the money hides.
Almost every app is "4.5 stars." The rating count is where the truth is.
Most apps are quietly abandoned. Here is how long they survive, and how many still ship.
The vast majority of developers ship exactly one app. A tiny few ship hundreds.
Over half of all apps speak only one language. A minority are built for the world.
How heavy apps have become, which categories bloat, and the gigabyte club.
How the App Store splits by age rating, and which categories skew grown-up.
Which categories are the biggest, the best rated, the priciest, and the most crowded.
The typical app still runs on an iPhone from years ago. Minimum-iOS requirements, translated into the actual iPhones they rule out.
Most apps fill over half their ten screenshot slots. The extremes are the real tell.
The store is a mix of ancient survivors and this year's newcomers. Here is the age map.
Some say it in a sentence; others write to the 4,000-character limit. What description length reveals.
Seven in ten apps ship iPad screenshots. Which ones do not, and what that says about the tablet.
The comfortable assumption is that paying buys a better app. The ratings say otherwise.
How much of the App Store is actively maintained, and how big the abandoned tail really is.
English is in nine of ten apps. For the world's other billions of speakers, the store looks very different.
Behind every age rating is a list of specific warnings — violence, gambling, mature themes. Here is what the store is really flagging.
The US and UK charts are near-clones. Others share almost nothing. We measured the App Store's borders.
We sorted thousands of app icons by colour. One hue dominates every home screen — and it is not close.
We cross top-chart apps' language counts with each country's internet penetration and GDP per capita to see if connectivity buys localization.
Beyond star ratings: which app categories are winning back users, and which are quietly losing them.
Charm pricing is supposed to be universal, but the App Store's love of the .99 ending is wildly uneven across currencies, categories, and eras.
Content ratings quietly shape price, popularity, and marketing effort across the App Store.
Some App Store leaderboards flip constantly while others barely budge — we tracked every dethroning on record.
Achievements and leaderboards were once every game's calling card — who still bothers to wire them up?
Repeated snapshots reveal which apps and categories are actually gaining ratings fastest — not just which are biggest.
Tracking every recorded price move on the App Store reveals who cuts, who hikes, and when they strike.
A tiny sliver of publishers controls a staggering share of all App Store ratings ever logged.
We cross GDP per capita and internet penetration against what tops each country's charts and how it's priced.
Showing 29 studies. Every study states its sample, its window, and what it cannot show.