How Many App Store Categories Are There?

Books, Business, Developer Tools, Education, Entertainment, Finance, Food & Drink, Games, Graphics & Design, Health & Fitness, Lifestyle, Kids (iOS and iPadOS only), Magazines & Newspapers, Medical, Music, Navigation, News, Photo & Video, Productivity, Reference, Safari Extensions, Shopping, Social Networking, Sports, Travel, Utilities and Weather.

• The primary category determines where the app appears when browsing or filtering search results.
• Both the primary and the optional secondary category are indexed by the search algorithm, which makes category words part of text relevance.
• Games can have up to two Games subcategories.
• Guideline 2.3.5 requires selecting the most appropriate category; Apple may change it if it is way off base.
• For macOS apps, the category is also set in Xcode, and the primary category in App Store Connect should match it.

A hypothetical habit tracker chooses Health & Fitness as primary and Productivity as secondary. Because both are indexed, category words need not be repeated in the keyword field: Apple advises not to repeat words from the name, subtitle or category there. See the 100-byte keyword answer for the budget this saves.

• Choosing a category for browsing traffic that does not fit the app. Apple may change a mismatched category.
• Forgetting the Xcode setting on Mac.

Compare the rest of the page fields in the metadata limits reference, and see whether you can reset ratings when you reposition an app.

See also: search popularity scale and App Store countries.