Open any App Store category and the first screen is the same handful of companies you already knew about. Scroll and it stays that way for a while. The reasonable conclusion — that the App Store is a market of giants and there is nothing at your scale in it — is wrong, and the data that disproves it is the same data that produced the impression.
The distribution, measured
Across the 1,046 charting apps in this site's bundled dataset:
| Rating count | Apps | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Under 1,000 | 309 | 30% |
| Under 10,000 | 578 | 55% |
| 10,000 and above | 468 | 45% |
More than half the apps that are charting well enough to appear in this dataset have fewer than ten thousand ratings. Nearly a third have fewer than a thousand.
They are not missing from the list. They are below the fold, because a browse grid ordered by chart position puts the largest apps on top by construction — which is exactly what a chart is for, and exactly what makes it a bad tool for the question "what does an app at my scale look like here".
Why the threshold is 10,000
Any cut-off like this is a choice, and a tool that hides it is asking you to trust a number you cannot see. So Appstro's apps directory shows it: the "hide the giants" filter cuts at 10,000 ratings, and the reason is the distribution above.
At 10,000 the filter hides 468 apps and leaves 578 — roughly a half-and-half split, which is what you want from a threshold meant to change what you are looking at. At 50,000 it would hide only 327, which is barely a filter at all.
The threshold is printed in the interface rather than left implicit, so nobody has to guess where the line was drawn.
One implementation rule worth stealing
The toggle defaults to off, and that is not a UX preference.
Both /apps and every category page are prerendered into static HTML, and that static HTML is the crawlable index for every app in the dataset. If the filter defaulted to on, the published page would ship with 468 apps missing from it — the links would exist only for someone who found and clicked the toggle.
Verified against the build output: the prerendered /apps page contains all 1,046 app links.
The general form of this rule applies to any filter on a prerendered page: filter in the browser, render everything. A default that hides content is a default that unpublishes it.
What a chart position actually is
Worth being precise, because "charting" gets used loosely.
A chart position is a rank within one country and one genre on one of Apple's lists. It is not a measure of quality, revenue or users, and Apple publishes no formula for it. What it verifiably is: a public, comparable, daily-changing position that anyone can read.
Two things follow that are easy to get wrong when working with chart data:
Apple caps its chart feeds at 100 entries whatever limit you request — verified across all 25 genres. Anything reporting a "top 200" from those feeds is reporting 100 apps and a hopeful parameter.
Falling off a chart has no magnitude. An app that drops out of the top 100 went to somewhere past 100; there is no way to know where. Appstro's movers therefore report drop-offs with a null delta and an explicit kind, rather than a number invented from the boundary. And drop-offs are suppressed entirely when a snapshot looks incomplete — otherwise one half-fetched morning publishes as fifty apps leaving the store overnight.
The useful way to browse
If you are looking for what an app at your scale looks like in your category — its listing, its screenshots, its update cadence, its rating count — the giants are the least informative entries on the page. They have resources you do not, and their listings reflect decisions made for a different problem.
The apps sitting between 500 and 10,000 ratings are the ones whose choices are legible and comparable. There are 578 of them here, and they were always in the list.
What to actually look at, once you can see them
A comparison set is only worth having if you know what to read off it. With the giants filtered out, four things become legible that were not before:
Listing shape. Where the name ends and the subtitle begins, how the first line of the description opens, whether the first screenshot carries a caption. These are decisions made under the same constraints you have.
Update recency. The date of the current version is public for every app. A category where the comparable apps last shipped fourteen months ago is a different competitive situation from one where they shipped last week — and it is one of very few facts about a competitor that needs no estimate at all.
Rating count against age. An app with 1,200 ratings after four years and an app with 1,200 after four months are not the same app. Both numbers are on the public listing.
How many storefronts they bothered with. Whether a comparable app localized its listing tells you what the category's own operators concluded was worth doing.
None of that is available from the top of the chart, because the apps at the top made those decisions with a marketing team and a budget. The interesting evidence is in the middle of the list.
What this cannot tell you
- Not the whole App Store. This dataset is apps that appear on Apple's public charts across the tracked genres and storefronts. Apps that never chart are not in it, and there are far more of those than there are of these.
- Not downloads or revenue. Rating count is a proxy for scale and a poor one — it varies enormously by category and by how aggressively an app asks.
- Not why anything ranks where it does. Apple publishes no chart formula.
- Not a target. "Half the charting apps are under 10k ratings" describes the field. It does not say what your app should be.
The work
Open the directory or your own category, turn the filter on, and look at the twenty apps you have never heard of that are ranking anyway. That is the comparison set worth studying — and the one the default ordering was always going to hide.