We analysed 1,138 charting App Store apps
Data as of · rebuilt daily · free to cite
Every figure below is computed from the 1,138 apps currently on the US App Store top free, top grossing and top paid charts. These are not average apps — they are apps that made a chart — which makes them the right comparison set if you are trying to work out what “good” looks like before you ship.
Charting does not mean huge
The assumption behind most competitive research is that the charts belong to giants. They mostly do not. 624 of the 1,138 apps here — 54.8% — carry fewer than 10,000 ratings, and 341 (30%) have fewer than 1,000. Only 140 apps in the whole set have crossed a million.
The practical consequence: if you are benchmarking against the household names in your category you are benchmarking against 12.3% of the chart. Filter them out on the apps directory and the comparison gets a lot more useful.
Almost everything is free
893 apps (78.5%) cost nothing to download. The 245 that charge upfront cluster at a median of 3.99. This is why comparing prices across a category tells you almost nothing — the decision that matters is the monetization model, not the sticker, and Apple publishes no in-app purchase prices at all. The monetization mix tool reports the model across the 25 apps in a given search result instead.
Ratings are not a differentiator
The median charting app sits at 4.7 stars, and only 72 apps — 6.3% — are below 4.0. A 4.5 does not stand out here; it is slightly below par. What separates apps is rating volume relative to their reach, which is the comparison the rating benchmark makes.
A quarter of the chart is stale
The median charting app last shipped 42 days ago. 477 (41.9%) shipped within the last month — but 298 (26.2%) have not shipped in over a year and are still charting. Update frequency is not the entry requirement it is often described as. Apple publishes no ranking factor for it, and this dataset does not support one either.
Nobody uses their full app name
Apple allows 30 characters for the app name. The median charting app uses 25, and just 2 exceed 30 — those are legacy listings from before the current cap. Most apps are leaving name characters unspent, which is the one field Apple indexes most heavily. The metadata checker shows what yours currently spends.
Where the chart lives
The 1,138 apps span 25 categories, concentrated in a handful:
- Games222 · 19.5%
- Productivity199 · 17.5%
- Entertainment96 · 8.4%
- Finance84 · 7.4%
- Utilities78 · 6.9%
- Social Networking56 · 4.9%
Methodology
The dataset is every app appearing on Apple’s public US App Store top free, top grossing and top paid feeds, refreshed daily, deduplicated by track ID — 1,138 apps as of 2026-08-20. Category, price, average rating, rating count, release date and last-update date come from Apple’s own listing data.
Medians are used throughout rather than means, because rating counts span four orders of magnitude and a mean would describe none of the apps in the set.
What this is not: it is not a sample of the App Store. It is a census of one storefront’s charts, so every figure describes apps that already succeeded enough to chart. It says nothing about the millions of apps that never do. It also contains no download, revenue or search-volume figures — Apple publishes none of those, and estimates from third parties are labelled as estimates everywhere else on this site rather than folded into a study.
Free to cite with a link back. The numbers regenerate on every build, so a figure quoted from this page is dated by the “data as of” line at the top.
Run any of this against your own app: grade the listing, find its keywords, or browse every free App Store optimization tool.