App Store Keywords for Medical Apps: Thin Demand Outside the US

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

Two rows deserve a second look. "Telemedicine" scores 39 / 55 in the US, with difficulty above volume, and 3 or 0 elsewhere: one storefront has apps with large rating counts; the others return little. "First aid" is the opposite extreme, a flat 3 / 0 (2 in Germany) across the grid, which is the signature of a query that returns few apps. Neither row says that a first-aid app would be easy to find; they say that the English phrase finds almost nothing in the data.

Medical's pooled median of 29 ratings is mostly the effect of the smaller storefronts. By storefront it ranges from about 2,510 in the US to 71 in Great Britain, 29.5 in Germany and 4 in Japan. The genre match (71.7%) is close to the study average, and 23.3% of the US results were Health & Fitness apps. Several phrases ("medication reminder", "glucose tracker") are used for personal tracking as well as clinical care, and the category assignment an app chooses is its own decision. The phrase-to-category mapping is approximate across the study.

• Zero is not an opening. Difficulty of 0 with volume of 3 appears in the data for queries that return very few apps. The guide on spotting dead keywords explains how to separate a quiet niche from a phrase nobody types.
• Look for the local phrase. Four of the six phrases are at or below 3 volume in Japan, France or Brazil. Those storefronts need their own vocabulary, which our English test did not cover; see translate or transcreate keywords.
• Pick the category on the facts. Apple's Guideline 2.3.5 requires the most appropriate category, and Apple may change it if it is far off. A wellness tracker belongs with Health & Fitness, and a lookup tool for clinical facts may sit closer to Reference. Metadata keywords cannot fix a category that does not fit the app.
• Study products have a twin. Anatomy and first-aid learning content competes with Education apps for the same learners.

Nothing here is medical or regulatory advice. It describes search results for English phrases on one day.

We selected six generic English phrases per category and queried the iTunes Search API (entity=software, limit=25) in the US, GB, DE, JP, FR and BR, analysing the top 10 results of each query; Medical is 36 queries and 360 slots, fetched 2026-11-01. See the research methodology, the research hub and how we measure. Data: category CSV.

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