By the Numbers: Analyzing App Downloads in the App Store and Google Play
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - Let's Go Viral. Check out the full article for more insights.
How many apps get a thousand downloads a month? How about 100, or a million? That's the kind of question I get asked very often and the results always surprise people.
To answer this question more conclusively, I analyzed all of the apps in the App Store and on Google Play using our download estimates. We recently expanded our country coverage, so we have even better visibility into downloads.
FYI - This is a follow-up to the Monthly Millionaire Club I covered a couple of weeks ago.
I grouped apps by their downloads and looked at all apps with more than 100 downloads in the last month and all the way up to the 10M+.
I'm sure you can guess which group has the most apps (and games), but you can guess how big it is?
Most apps in my analysis, 47.7% to be precise, got between 100 and 1K downloads globally in the last month. How close was your guess?
33.3% of all the apps I looked at got between 1K and 10K downloads in the last 30 days across the App Store and Google Play.
Add those two up and you'll see that 80% of apps and games get under 10K downloads every month, which averages around 300 downloads a day on the high end. And that's 80% of apps with more than 100 downloads per month, so it doesn't include most of the App Store and even less of Google Play.
The next group is the only other group with a double-digit percentage, and that's the 10K - 100K group. This is also where we start to see more investment in paid ads and Apple Search Ads.
Only a handful of apps, 3.8% of the apps in the analysis, saw between 100K and 1M downloads in the last 30 days. More apps in this category come from Google Play vs. the App Store.
And maybe I used the term "handful" too soon because when we zoom in on apps with between 1M and 10M downloads, the number shrinks to just 0.5%. Most household names, like Twitter and the App Store versions of TikTok and Instagram, fall into this group.
The last group is the tiniest of them all - so small it only has 21 apps in total in it. That's the 10M+ group. 20 of those come from Google Play and 1 from the App Store. Just 1.
If you read the Monthly Millionaire's Club article you might find this a bit surprising, but that was revenue and this is downloads. Google Play attracts many more downloads overall.
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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.
