App Store Keywords for Developer Tools Apps: Near-Zero Difficulty, Near-Zero Volume

Estimated volume / estimated difficulty (0-100), English phrases in all six storefronts.

Look at what the 3s mean. In this dataset a volume of 3 is the value that appears when a query returns few apps. "Json viewer" and "api client" are 3 in all six storefronts. They are not hidden gold; they are phrases for which the search returned few apps with ratings. The only phrases with a volume above 20 anywhere are "code editor" (US 27, DE 25) and "ssh client" (US 25, DE 24).

Names are the shortest in the study at 20.0 characters, and 54% contain the whole query. Where an app does exist for a phrase, it is usually named for what it is. The US median is 13 ratings and Great Britain's is 1; one result in the top ten may have only a handful of ratings. The genre match is high (86.7% of US results), with Education and Productivity at 5.0% each. The phrase-to-category mapping is approximate across the study.

• Do not mistake a quiet table for a market. A difficulty of 0 only says that no established rating-heavy app is in the way. Whether anyone searches is a separate question, and volume of 3 suggests very few do. Treat the outcome as "unmeasurable", and look at where your users actually find tools: web search, documentation, repositories and word of mouth.
• Use the category for discovery by browsing. The primary category decides where an app appears when users browse or filter, and Apple indexes the primary and optional secondary category in search. A developer tool may benefit more from being correctly categorised than from a long keyword list. See Utilities and Productivity for the two neighbouring categories that attract generic tools.
• Keep the Mac category consistent. For macOS apps the category is also set in Xcode, and the primary category in App Store Connect should match it. ASO for Mac apps and Mac App Store keyword research cover that side.
• Verify demand before you build metadata around it. Test any candidate against your own analytics, and do not infer from this table that a phrase has users.

The study queried the iTunes Search API (entity=software, limit=25) with six generic English phrases per category in the US, GB, DE, JP, FR and BR, and analysed the top 10 results of each query: 36 queries and 360 slots for Developer Tools, fetched 2026-11-01. See the research methodology, the research hub and how we measure. Data: category CSV. Reference-style tool lookups are in Reference.

LocalASO is a Mac app that estimates volume and difficulty in 52 storefronts, each in its local language. It costs $29 once; the free download needs a license key to run. See pricing.