App Store Keywords for Utilities Apps: Short, Plain Names and Even Demand

Estimated volume / estimated difficulty on a 0-100 scale. The phrases are English in all storefronts.

What is unusual is the evenness. Every phrase has a volume between 20 and 75 in every storefront, and difficulty reaches 60 or more only twice, in the US ("password manager" 62, "calculator" 60). There is no phrase that is near zero and none that saturates the scale. Compare that with Social Networking or Medical, where single phrases sit at either end. For a utility developer this means the choice of phrase matters less for difficulty than for fit.

The exact-title share is 78% in both the US and Great Britain and 37% in Germany. English-speaking storefronts show English phrases in English names; the German names for the same functions are mostly something else. The US median rating count is about 26,900 against roughly 1,100 to 2,300 in the other storefronts, a reminder that US averages hide most of the weight.

The genre match is 61.7%, with Productivity at 26.7% of US results. That is the category boundary Apple's Guideline 2.3.5 asks developers to decide on: it requires the most appropriate category and Apple may change it if it is far off. A password or file tool could sit in either. Our phrase-to-category mapping is approximate throughout.

1. Short names are a design choice with a keyword effect. With a 30-character limit and names averaging 20.5 characters, a utility name often has about ten characters of headroom. See app name keyword strategy on how to spend them without stuffing.
2. Do not copy the exact-title pattern blindly. In Germany only 37% of names carry the full phrase. Check the storefront you are in.
3. Use the second category for a real second use. Apple indexes the optional secondary category as well as the primary. If your tool is both a utility and a work tool, the Productivity overlap is a legitimate question; reference-style converters sit with Reference, where difficulty is far lower but so is demand.
4. Mac apps: keep the category consistent. For a macOS app the category is also set in Xcode and the primary category in App Store Connect should match it. ASO for Mac apps goes through that and the Developer Tools case.

For each of 26 categories we picked six generic English phrases and queried the iTunes Search API (entity=software, limit=25) in the US, GB, DE, JP, FR and BR, analysing the top 10 results per query: 36 queries and 360 slots for Utilities, 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 in its local language. It costs $29 one time; the free download needs a license key to run. See pricing.