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

Ages come from each app's releaseDate, which is the first release date and not the date of the latest update. Computed from the per-query CSVs, the quartiles were 5.4 years (25th percentile), 9.0 (median) and 12.6 (75th), and 77.8% of slots were held by apps at least 5 years old, about 42% by apps at least 10 years old. Apps under one year old held 5.7% of slots.

Two cautions. Rating counts lag behind current popularity, and this study measures top-10 membership, not a ranking trend, so a long-lived app that stays in the list for years is counted in every search where it appears. Second, one app can appear in many of the 2,729 searches, so the 27,188 slots are not 27,188 different apps.

Median age of the top-10 apps, with the share of slots held by apps released in the previous two years, for the 26 categories (each 360 slots, Kids 350).

News and Magazines & Newspapers have the oldest top 10, and Developer Tools the youngest, with 39% of slots going to apps under two years old. The Developer Tools phrases also had very few rated apps (median 5 ratings in the category study), so this row describes a thin set of results. Category mapping is approximate: only 68.6% of US top-10 apps matched their phrase's own category.

Median age varied little between large storefronts: United States 9.9 years, Germany 9.8, Japan 9.6, United Kingdom 9.6, France 9.5, Brazil 9.2. Among smaller ones, Bulgaria was 9.0 and Croatia 8.5. Across all 52 storefronts the range was 7.8 (Malaysia) to 10.1 (Australia).

99.5% of top-10 slots were held by free-to-download apps (146 of 27,193 prices were above zero). Developer Tools had the highest paid share among the S2 categories (8.1%), followed by Books (3.6%) and Medical (2.5%). Price here is the upfront price: in-app purchases and subscriptions are not visible in the API data, so this says nothing about how these apps earn revenue.

Rankings for generic phrases tend to be held by apps with years of accumulated ratings, which fits the rating-count signal that LocalASO's difficulty estimate uses. For a new app that is a reason to look for phrases where the top 10 includes recent or low-rated apps, as the guide on keywords you can rank for describes, rather than a claim that new apps cannot rank: 10% of slots did go to apps under two years old. The data does not show why old apps rank, and a high rating count is one plausible factor among others.

One snapshot on 2026-11-01; ages are computed to that date from first release dates. The API does not show in-app purchases. See the methodology page and the overview of big apps in the top 10.

LocalASO shows volume and difficulty estimates from rating counts for 52 storefronts. A one-time $29 Mac app that needs a license key to run. See pricing.