App Store Keywords for Productivity Apps: A Category Without Easy Storefronts

Estimated volume / estimated difficulty, 0-100. Phrases were English in every storefront.

Germany is notable: "email" scores 87 difficulty there, the highest outside the US (95), and "calendar" scores 46 in both Germany and Great Britain. The only phrase that drops below 30 in most storefronts is "pomodoro timer", a narrow technique name instead of a generic function.

Two readings are worth keeping apart. The first is about size: Productivity top 10s are populated by apps with thousands of ratings in every storefront, which is why smaller markets give less relief. In Japan the median top-10 app had about 22,000 ratings for these phrases, the largest Japanese median of any category in the basket. The second is about wording: only 28% of names contain the full phrase, while 67% of names have a separator. Names in this category are mostly brand-first with a descriptor, and the descriptor often does not match the exact query. We cannot tell from this whether apps rank because of the descriptor or despite it.

1. Do not count on a small storefront. If your plan relies on Japan or Germany being easy for English productivity terms, this data says otherwise. Start with the guide on ASO for small storefronts and measure the terms you care about directly.
2. Choose the technique over the label. "Pomodoro timer" is far cheaper than "planner" or "task manager" because it names a method, not a job. Look for the method, format or audience that describes your product, then rank it using volume and difficulty together.
3. Use the second category. Apple indexes both the primary and the optional secondary category. A work-focused tool could carry Productivity as one and Business as the other; check the real options in choosing primary and secondary categories.
4. Compare close neighbours. Small single-purpose tools may be competing against Utilities apps, which have far less rating weight (11% of top-10 apps with 50,000 ratings against 27% here).

The dataset covers 26 categories x 6 English phrases x 6 storefronts, 936 queries through the iTunes Search API (entity=software, limit=25), with the top 10 apps per query analysed. For Productivity: 36 queries, 360 slots. The phrase-to-category mapping is approximate, and DE, JP, FR and BR columns describe English demand. Read the research methodology, visit the research hub, or see how we measure. Data: category CSV.

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