The Version Number Myth

Of the 1,035,695 apps in this dataset, 597,868 never moved past major version 1. That's 57.7% of the entire set, well ahead of everything else. Version 2 comes in at 149,063 apps (14.4%), version 5+ sits at 157,112 (15.2%), and the middle ground, versions 3 and 4, holds 76,889 (7.4%) and 41,947 (4.1%) apps. Version 0 is the smallest group at 12,816 apps (1.2%), probably apps that got pulled or abandoned before anyone shipped a real first release. It's not hard to see why this pattern exists. Someone builds an app, ships it, and walks away long before a second major rewrite would ever happen. Line up a version 1 app next to a version 5+ app and you're not comparing like with like. One pile is dropped projects and dead weight, the other a small, stubborn group that kept going. A high major version number just means an app stuck around, not that it's any good.

Average rating climbs in near lockstep with major version: 1.7 at version 1, 2.3 at version 2, 2.5 at version 3, 2.6 at version 4, and 2.6 at version 5+. Version 0 breaks the pattern, averaging 2.1, higher than version 1's 1.7 despite being the earliest-stage release. Unfinished apps haven't been out long enough to collect the bad reviews that would drag the average down. Between version 1 (1.7) and version 4 (2.6) sits almost a full point of difference, a sizable move for an average built from a large pool of individual ratings. Version 4 and version 5+ both land at 2.6, so whatever pushes ratings upward stalls in the middle versions. That plateau tells the real story. More major versions stop buying a better rating past a certain point; clearing version 1 or 2 means an app has cleared a bar that weak apps never reach. The real separation happens in the jump from 1 to 2, not from 4 to 5+.

This cut gives us the steepest, cleanest slope in the whole dataset. Average longevity starts at 462.5 days at version 0, edges up to 511.8 days at version 1, then leaps to 1,375.0 days at version 2, nearly triple the prior figure. And it keeps going: 1,776.9 days at version 3, 2,039.7 days at version 4, and 2,118.2 days at version 5+. An app that reaches version 5+ has, on average, stuck around more than four times as long as one still stuck at version 1.

This isn't some labeling quirk. An app simply can't rack up five major version bumps without surviving, and being actively maintained, long enough to ship them. That doesn't mean a higher version number causes longer life. What it shows is that the major version count functions almost like a clock, a rough odometer for how long an app has sat in active development. So if you're trying to guess how long an app has survived, its major version number turns out to be a surprisingly reliable proxy, better than nearly anything else in this table.

Average rating counts shoot up as you move across this cut. At version 1 it's 577.5, version 2 climbs to 1,626.5, version 3 hits 2,571.7, version 4 reaches 4,685.3, and by version 5+ it's all the way up at 12,539.5, over twenty times the bottom figure. Version 0 is the odd one out at 1,314.3, sitting above both version 1 and version 2, which looks less like a meaningful trend and more like a small, quirky cluster of apps skewing the number. What's actually going on here is compounding. Apps that last long enough to hit high major versions have also been around long enough, and used enough, to pile up way more ratings. The two forces reinforce each other: a bigger rating pile and more time on the market both give a team reason to keep pushing updates. So the line "higher version number means more ratings" is thin shorthand at best. Bumping a version number doesn't conjure new ratings from thin air. Both rating count and version count are trailing the same real driver, which is simply staying in continuous operation for years. Rating count and major version are better read as two symptoms of longevity sitting side by side, not as one causing the other.

Changelog length doesn't follow the same straight path as the other metrics, and that's worth digging into. Average length starts at 87.8 for version 1, climbs to a high of 130.5 by version 3, then slips at version 4 (129.9) and slips further at version 5+ (124.3). Version 0 also starts thin, at 94.2, roughly in line with version 1's short notes. So the shape is a rise followed by a slow fade. Apps in the middle of their lifespan, versions 2 and 3, tend to write the longest release notes. The apps that have been around longest, version 5+, actually write shorter notes than apps half their age. That makes sense once you think about it as a maturity story: a team several major versions into a stable app usually doesn't have sweeping changes left to explain, while a team working through versions 2 and 3 is often reshaping core parts of the app, and that takes more words to describe. If you're using changelog length as a stand-in for development effort, the real takeaway is that it peaks mid-lifecycle and then keeps shrinking, even as the app keeps going and its ratings keep climbing.

The numbers lay out a pretty blunt survivorship story. 597,868 apps are sitting at version 1, and only 65,163 have made it to version 10 or higher. That version 10+ group is just 10.9% the size of the version 1 group. Ratings follow the same shape: version 1 apps average 1.74, which works out to 68.5% of the 2.54 average that version 10+ apps manage. So out of every 100 apps parked at version 1, fewer than 11 ever get to version 10 or past it, and the ones that do tend to carry ratings about a third higher. What this suggests isn't subtle: climbing the major version ladder is really a filter for survival and quality at once, not some lever a team can just pull as a growth tactic. And don't go mining the high-version apps for "best practices" either. That's a small, self-selected 10.9% slice, and its strong average rating probably says more about everything that didn't survive along the way than it does about what bumping up version numbers actually buys you.