How many big apps hold the App Store top 10?

LocalASO's difficulty estimate gives 30 percent of its weight to the share of top-10 apps with at least 50,000 ratings. This study counts that share directly. Pooled over all 1,040 English-phrase searches (10,400 top-10 slots), 7% of slots were held by such apps and the pooled median rating count was 1,436. In other words, for a typical search a top-10 result is not a giant; the giants cluster in a few storefronts and categories.

The ranking of the highest and lowest storefronts, from the S1 English basket:

Four storefronts had no top-10 slot at all held by an app with 50,000 or more ratings in this sample. The US share is more than double the next storefront, which is why averages across countries say little about any single one. The full 52-storefront figures are in the country comparison.

The category basket uses 26 App Store categories, six phrases each, in six storefronts (US, GB, DE, JP, FR, BR). Across all of it, 19% of slots went to apps with 50,000+ ratings. That is higher than the 7% in S1 possibly because S2 covers only six storefronts, several of them large. The storefront figures above come from the S1 per-storefront CSV, the category figures from the CSV offered with this page.

The category mapping is approximate (in the US, 68.6% of top-10 apps for a category's phrases had that category as primary genre), so read categories as phrase groups, not as official genre rankings.

A high share means the top 10 is crowded with apps whose rating counts a newer app will not match soon; a low share means the cut-off for the top 10 is much lower. That suggests where to expect a hard fight, but it is a correlation in rating counts. It does not show that big apps rank because of their ratings, and Apple does not publish its ranking weights. For practical use, check your own keyword's top 10 with the keyword difficulty definition in mind and prefer phrases where several slots belong to apps with modest rating counts.

S1 uses 20 phrases per storefront and S2 six per category and storefront, one snapshot on 2026-11-01. Rating counts lag behind current popularity. Full method on the methodology page.

LocalASO applies the 50,000-rating line inside its difficulty score for every keyword and storefront. It is a Mac app, $29 one-time, and needs a license key to run. See pricing.