App Store research

Research

• App Store competition by country: 52 storefronts measured

  Median rating counts, volume and difficulty for the top 10 App Store results in 52 countries, from 1,040 English-phrase searches run on 2026-11-01.

• App Store keyword competition by category (26 categories)

  Mean difficulty ranged from 51.9 (Social Networking) to 1.3 (Developer Tools) across 26 App Store categories in 936 searches on 2026-11-01.

• ASO research methodology: how the App Store study was run

  How LocalASO ran 2,729 iTunes Search API queries on 2026-11-01: baskets, formulas, rate limits, every CSV, and the limits that apply to all results.

• Do local and English searches show the same top 10 apps?

  A local-language phrase and its English twin shared a mean Jaccard overlap of 0.26 in 753 pairs, and 13.1% of pairs shared no app at all (2026-11-01).

• Do storefronts that share a language share their top 10 apps?

  Same-language storefront pairs overlapped 0.56 (Jaccard) on identical English phrases versus 0.43 for unrelated pairs: modest support, mostly global apps.

• Do top App Store apps use the search phrase in their name?

  56% of top-10 app names contained every word of the English query in 1,040 searches; vpn reached 97%, note taking only 7%. Data by phrase and category.

• How long are top App Store app names? Characters, bytes, separators

  Top-10 app names averaged 24.1 characters (26.3 bytes) in 27,188 slots; 63% were 25-30 characters and 57% used a separator. CJK names run longer in bytes.

• How many big apps hold the App Store top 10?

  Apps with 50,000+ ratings held 7% of top-10 slots across 52 storefronts (56% in the US, 0% in four countries) and 43% for Social Networking queries.

• How old are the apps that rank in the App Store top 10?

  The median top-10 app was first released 9 years before 2026-11-01, only 10% of slots went to apps under 2 years old, and 99.5% were free to download.

• Local-language vs English keywords: what 753 pairs showed

  Local phrases returned more results than English ones in 57.1% of 753 pairs but scored lower volume (30.5 vs 35.3). Translations are unverified.

• Non-Latin app names: how common are they in top results?

  In Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong over 90% of top-10 names for local searches used non-Latin letters; in Thailand and Ukraine it was 8% and 2%.

• Small App Store storefronts compared with the US

  Eight smaller storefronts (SE, NO, DK, AT, FI, HR, SK, BG) scored a mean difficulty of 11.7 against 66.5 in the US for the same 20 English phrases.