App Store Turnover by Category

There have been some stories recently about how games continue to dominate the charts on the App Store and have even been increasing that lead. Seems like someone mentioned, or perhaps I just thought it to myself, that while games own the charts, they have a shorter lifespan than apps in other categories, and therefore have a smaller window over which to generate revenue. I’ve been wondering about this and decided to see if I could figure out whether or not this was true.

Fortunately I still have the scripts and data I generated last year when I was looking into the App Store category breakdowns.

Step one was to grab a snapshot of the charts from last year and compare them to the charts today. I should note before I get too far along that I decided to focus exclusively on the iPhone top 400 grossing charts for this post. Specifically April 20, 2012 versus April 20, 2013. So, the first thing we notice is that the Games category has indeed grown from 65.0% of the top 400 to 74.2% at the expense of every other category except News. Although News is almost certainly skewed given the events over the past week as we’ll see later. Social is second best at a whopping 4.0%. 12 of the 21 different categories are at 1% or less, and Medical and Travel apps are completely absent from the top 400.

The next thing I noticed was that there are 205 games appearing in the top 400 that weren’t there last year. 69% of the games in the top 400 are new to the charts. That would seem to indicate that there is a pretty big chunk of turnover in the games category. But then again, there are at least 55 games that appear in the top 400 both years, so it’s not automatically a given that a game has a limited time to make hay. That probably goes without saying when you think about Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, etc. But how much more staying power do apps in other categories have when compared to games?

If we take away games we’re left with 103 apps in the top 400. Of those, only 39 apps are new this year. Just 9.8% of the top 400 are new non-game apps. 37.9% of the total. That means that 64 non-game apps were in the top 400 both years. It would appear that the other categories have more staying power if only 37.9% are new versus 69% of the games. But, looking at the new apps in each category the numbers are all over the place because the sample size is so small. We really need to look at the top 400 chart by category to get a clearer picture.

Category Top 400 Overall Top 400
Then Now Change New new in category
Qty % Qty % Qty % Qty % Qty %
Books 5 1.2% 4 1.0% -1 -20.0%

0 0.0% 203 50.7%
Business 9 2.2% 3 0.8% -6 -66.7%

0 0.0% 211 52.8%
Education 5 1.2% 2 0.5% -3 -60.0%

1 50.0% 236 59.0%
Entertainment 14 3.5% 7 1.8% -7 -50.0%

3 42.9% 259 64.8%
Finance 2 0.5% 1 0.2% -1 -50.0%

0 0.0% 200 50.0%
Food & Drink 0 0.0% 1 0.2% 1 n/a n/a n/a n/a
Games 260 65.0% 297 74.2% 37 14.2%

205 69.0% 264 66.0%
Health 10 2.5% 7 1.8% -3 -30.0%

3 42.9% 178 44.5%
Lifestyle 5 1.2% 4 1.0% -1 -20.0%

2 50.0% 249 62.3%
Medical 1 0.2% 0 0.0% -1 -100.0%

0 212 53.0%
Music 13 3.2% 12 3.0% -1 -7.7%

4 33.3% 177 44.2%
Navigation 10 2.5% 6 1.5% -4 -40.0%

0 0.0% 188 47.0%
News 3 0.8% 7 1.8% 4 133.3%

4 57.1% 245 61.3%
Photo 12 3.0% 11 2.8% -1 -8.3%

6 54.5% 219 54.8%
Productivity 11 2.8% 9 2.2% -2 -18.2%

5 55.6% 182 45.5%
Reference 4 1.0% 1 0.2% -3 -75.0%

0 0.0% 218 54.5%
Social 16 4.0% 16 4.0% 0 0.0%

5 31.2% 198 49.5%
Sports 4 1.0% 4 1.0% 0 0.0%

1 25.0% 217 54.2%
Travel 2 0.5% 0 0.0% -2 -100.0%

0 211 52.8%
Utilities 10 2.5% 4 1.0% -6 -60.0%

2 50.0% 229 57.2%
Weather 4 1.0% 4 1.0% 0 0.0%

2 50.0% 207 51.7%
Of Total
Total 400 400 244 61.0% 4303 51.2%
Minus Games 140 35.0% 103 25.8% 39 9.8% 4039 50.5%

The last column in the table shows how many new apps made the top 400 in their category versus last year. Games line up pretty closely with the overall chart with 66% versus 69%, but the other categories really aren’t *that* much better.

This is a little easier to see if we sort it like so:

  • Games – 66.0%
  • Entertainment – 64.8%
  • Lifestyle – 62.3%
  • News – 61.3%
  • Education – 59.0%
  • Utilities – 57.2%
  • Photo – 54.8%
  • Reference – 54.5%
  • Sports – 54.2%
  • Medical – 53.0%
  • Business – 52.8%
  • Travel – 52.8%
  • Weather – 51.7%
  • Books – 50.7%
  • Finance – 50.0%
  • Social – 49.5%
  • Navigation – 47.0%
  • Productivity – 45.5%
  • Health – 44.5%
  • Music – 44.2%

The turnover in Entertainment, Lifestyle, and News (again possibly skewed) are very nearly that of Games, and the others aren’t that far behind.

It’s a little difficult to determine exactly what this all means. With only 39 new apps in the overall chart you might be inclined to think that app discoverability is broken as everyone seems to believe, or maybe there just aren’t that many quality apps coming out to supplant the old ones? But looking at the individual categories makes me wonder if games aren’t just concealing what’s going on in the other categories and people are finding other apps just fine. Surely not through the App Store app itself though, because that thing is a mess. One other thing to consider is that maybe for the bottom of the category charts we’re operating down in the noise floor where a few sales either way can result in a huge position change. It’s hard to say without actual sales data to examine.

I could regenerate this data and focus on just the top 100 apps overall and for each category and possibly eliminate the noise floor question, but instead, I’m going to bop back and take a close look at those 39 apps that managed to crack the top 400 apps overall. Here they are:

49 Social Skype
52 Social OkCupid — social dating, meet new peop…
80 Health Touchfit: GSP
130 Social LINE
149 Education Toca Hair Salon 2
168 Photo Video Star
174 Music Free Music Download Pro – Downloader and…
180 Lifestyle textPlus Free Texting + Group Text
185 Photo AfterLight
204 Weather Storm Shield
206 News Police Scanner+
231 Productivity 1Password
237 News Scanner911 Police Radio Pro
246 Productivity Evernote
249 Music Sing! Karaoke
250 Productivity Things
263 Entertainment Disney Junior Appisodes
267 Social Palringo Instant Messenger
268 Music Free Music Download Pro Plus – Free Musi…
285 Utilities Minecraft Skins Pro: Creator
292 Entertainment My Forged Wedding
310 Weather MyRadar Weather Radar
311 Health Lose It!
312 Photo Private Photo Vault – Ultimate Photo+Vid…
317 Productivity Dropbox
320 Social HowAboutWe Dating – Find Singles & Go …
324 News The Wall Street Journal.
326 Photo Wood Camera
329 Lifestyle The Magazine.
339 News 5-0 Radio Police Scanner
349 Food & Drink Wine Spectator WineRatings+
351 Health Full Fitness : Exercise Workout Trainer
355 Sports NHL GameCenter 2011-2012
359 Utilities PokéBuilder – Build a Monster Cheat – F…
365 Music StarMaker: Karaoke + Auto-Tune
366 Productivity Triage: Email First Aid
390 Photo Over
393 Entertainment Live Esoteric Chat, Oranum
399 Photo picfx

This is kind of crazy and really makes me want to redo this focusing on the top one or two hundred. There are only 3 new apps in the top 100 that aren’t games.

Three.

Everything else in the top 100 is a game or was there last year. It doesn’t get much better if we extend that to the top 200 where there are 9 whole new apps.

And finally recall that the News category contained four new apps this year and the only category to increase its representation in the top 400 overall. Of those four, three are police scanners. It’s probably safe to assume these apps saw a spike in downloads by people anxious to listen in on the heroic work being performed by the police officers in Boston recently. Had things gone otherwise we would likely have only 36 new apps in the top 400 this year.

So, I’m probably asking myself more questions now that I’ve looked this all over than when I started. What I think is happening elsewhere is that there is a lot of churn, but it’s outside of the top overall charts. I believe that some of that is that the good apps rightly deserve their positions on the top of the charts, but I think some of it is also a discoverability problem. There seems to be movement lower down the charts, but the very top is pretty fixed.

And, although apps outside of games do have a longer shelf life, it’s seems to be less than I imagined. At least lower down which again makes me wonder if there isn’t some visibility threshold they’re just not able to cross. Which, sadly, just seems to reinforce that notice that if you’re looking to hit the lottery on the App Store, then it’ll have to be a game.

I don’t mind games. I like them a lot in fact. I’d just like to see a greater representation of apps from other categories in the top 400. I believe there are quite a few apps out there that deserve a brighter spotlight but are being muscled out of the picture by games. A solution to the discoverability problem or even just a new chart from Apple showing us the top 400 apps that aren’t games would certainly help.