App Store competition by country: 52 storefronts measured

Each row averages 20 phrases (for example "photo editor", "habit tracker", "vpn") searched in that storefront, using the top 10 results per search. "Median ratings" is the median rating count across the 200 apps in those top-10 lists. Volume and difficulty are 0-100 estimates, not Apple search counts.

Median rating counts are rounded to whole numbers. The CSV holds the unrounded values and more columns, including the share of top-10 apps with 50,000 or more ratings.

• The US is an outlier. Its median top-10 app has about 7.6 times the ratings of the next storefront, the United Kingdom, and its difficulty (66.5) is 26 points above the UK (40.4).
• Volume and difficulty move together. The five lowest-difficulty storefronts were Croatia, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Finland and Peru; the median storefront scored 36.5 for volume.
• 30 of the 52 storefronts averaged a difficulty below 20, and only two (US and GB) reached 40 or more.
• Rank order is not population order. Japan sits at 3,479 median ratings, below Brazil and India, so the table is a competition view, not a market-size view.

Treat the table as a map of where established apps have accumulated ratings, which is the signal LocalASO's volume and difficulty estimates are built from. A lower score suggests the top 10 is easier to enter; it does not show how many people search, and a quiet storefront can have little demand. The pattern is correlation in one sample of 20 generic phrases, so confirm with the keywords you actually target. The guide on weighing volume against difficulty shows how to combine the two, and the small-storefront results look at the bottom of this table in detail.

One search per phrase and storefront on 2026-11-01, top 10 results, 20 phrases per country, so each row is a small sample. Because requests used limit=25, the result-count part of volume is understated by up to about 2 points everywhere. Details are on the methodology page.

LocalASO checks keywords in 52 storefronts, each in its local language, and shows volume and difficulty beside your rank. It is a Mac app at a one-time $29 and needs a license key to run, even though the download is free. See pricing for details.