Small App Store storefronts compared with the US

"Small" here is the study's label for these eight storefronts, not an Apple category. Every row uses the identical 20 English phrases, so the differences come from who ranks in each country, not from the wording of the search.

For scale, the median storefront among all 52 scored 36.5 for volume. The five lowest-difficulty storefronts in the whole study were Croatia (7.5), Bulgaria (7.6), Slovakia (8.3), Finland (9.5) and Peru (11.1), so four of the five are in the table above.

First reading: the top 10 in small storefronts is easier to enter. The median top-10 app in Croatia has 203 ratings, a far lower bar than the US figure, and no top-10 slot for these phrases was held by an app with 50,000 or more ratings in Croatia, Slovakia or Bulgaria.

Second reading: the same table is a warning about demand. Volume drops with difficulty, from 76.6 in the US to 21.2 in Croatia. The volume estimate is built from the same rating counts as difficulty, so a weak top 10 can mean fewer established players, fewer searchers, or both. The study cannot separate them, because Apple does not publish search counts.

Neither reading is proven by this data. What the table does show is that the English-language phrase basket behaves very differently by country, so a keyword that is hopeless in the US may be reachable in Sweden or Austria. Whether it brings downloads depends on demand that these figures only approximate.

Use small-storefront scores to decide where to test, not where to expect volume. A low-difficulty, low-volume pair can still be a sensible place to localize first if the work is cheap; a low-difficulty, near-zero-volume pair is probably not worth it. Pair this page with the guide to ASO for small storefronts and with the idea of long-tail keywords, which are often where small markets differ least from large ones. Remember that English phrases were used even in countries where most people search in another language; the local-language comparison tests that choice.

Twenty phrases per storefront is a small sample, so single-country differences are indicative. All queries used limit=25 on one day, which understates volume by up to about 2 points in every country alike. The methodology page lists all limits.

LocalASO covers 52 storefronts, including all eight above, and shows volume and difficulty as estimates from public rating counts. It costs a one-time $29, needs a license key to run, and works on macOS only. See pricing.