App Store Category Breakdown

Lately I’ve been wondering about the composition of the top apps on the App Store. You may remember that a while back I took a look at the composition of the Top 200 paid / grossing apps versus the number of submissions in each category. I kind of wanted to look at it in a slightly different way this time.

I was wondering if there was any difference between the composition of the top categories on the iPhone versus the iPad. I also wanted to see how the composition of the top free charts compared to the top grossing charts. And finally I wanted to take a look at the Games sub-category breakdown. I’m not going to go into too much detail, rather just point out a few things that popped out at me as I looked over the numbers.

This time around I was also able to figure out what the top 400 apps are in the App Store. A bigger data set is always nice. Also, once again, these are the top charts at a particular moment in time. It doesn’t seem to me that the composition is going to change drastically from day to day.

So here’s the first table showing the composition of the various overall top 400 charts.

Category iPhone iPad
All Free Paid Grossing Free Paid Grossing
Books 1.00% 0.75% 1.25% 3.75% 3.25% 4.75%
Business 1.75% 2.75% 2.25% 2.00% 4.00% 4.75%
Education 1.75% 2.25% 1.75% 6.25% 11.50% 5.00%
Entertainment 13.50% 11.00% 5.00% 11.25% 7.00% 4.00%
Finance 2.50% 1.00% 0.50% 2.25% 0.50% 0.50%
Games 36.25% 45.75% 62.00% 35.00% 42.75% 48.25%
Health 3.25% 5.50% 2.00% 2.00% 1.75% 1.50%
Lifestyle 6.50% 3.00% 2.00% 8.00% 2.75% 5.00%
Medical 0.00% 0.25% 0.50% 0.00% 0.25% 1.25%
Music 4.25% 3.50% 3.75% 3.25% 1.75% 2.25%
Navigation 0.75% 1.50% 2.25% 0.25% 0.50% 0.75%
News 1.50% 0.50% 0.50% 4.75% 1.25% 4.75%
Photo 3.75% 6.75% 2.50% 2.00% 2.75% 1.25%
Productivity 3.25% 2.50% 2.25% 4.50% 9.00% 9.25%
Reference 1.75% 2.00% 1.50% 2.25% 1.75% 1.50%
Social 7.25% 3.25% 3.75% 3.00% 1.50% 1.00%
Sports 1.00% 0.25% 1.00% 1.50% 0.25% 0.50%
Travel 3.75% 0.25% 1.00% 2.50% 0.75% 0.50%
Utilities 6.00% 6.00% 3.75% 4.25% 5.75% 2.75%
Weather 0.25% 1.25% 0.50% 1.25% 1.00% 0.50%

First the iPhone. Hopefully no surprise that games dominate the charts. But, look at the difference between games in the top Free and Grossing charts. People might be installing apps from other categories, but games are what they’re paying for. The next most popular iPhone categories are Entertainment and Social apps, making up about 20% of free downloads, but only about 9% of the top grossing chart. I think we can also make some guesses about where in-app purchase really works by looking at these charts. If for example, a category has a much larger presence on the top paid chart as compared to the others, it stands to reason that people tend to pay for these apps up front rather than go the free route and upgrade via in-app. That’s my theory anyway. It is a bit of a surprise that Photography apps occupy a significantly larger chunk of the top paid charts than they do free/grossing. I imagined that many of Photography apps used IAP to sell filters and what not.

Moving over the iPad chart the patterns are similar, but you can see there is a noticeable increase in the number of apps that are in the Books, Business, Education, News and Productivity categories. People are basically a little more serious on the iPad.

So next I wanted to look at the Games sub-categories. Again these are from the top 400 charts, but you may notice that the percentages don’t add up to 100%. This is because Apple lets you choose up to two sub-categories for any game you submit to the App Store.

Category iPhone iPad
Games Free Paid Grossing Free Paid Grossing
Action 28.25% 37.75% 31.00% 24.50% 29.75% 24.25%
Adventure 18.25% 14.75% 23.75% 17.00% 18.25% 31.00%
Arcade 26.75% 29.50% 20.00% 24.00% 22.50% 14.25%
Board 8.75% 9.00% 5.25% 6.00% 8.50% 5.50%
Card 4.50% 2.25% 4.25% 6.50% 6.25% 5.00%
Casino 3.25% 2.50% 4.75% 4.50% 5.50% 5.50%
Dice 0.75% 0.50% 0.25% 0.00% 0.50% 0.75%
Educational 3.00% 3.25% 1.25% 6.25% 7.50% 2.25%
Family 14.25% 13.50% 10.50% 16.00% 17.00% 15.25%
Kids 13.50% 12.75% 5.00% 16.25% 17.00% 8.00%
Music 2.25% 1.75% 1.25% 1.50% 0.25% 0.50%
Puzzle 13.00% 15.50% 9.75% 16.25% 20.25% 17.00%
Racing 8.25% 7.75% 5.75% 8.25% 6.50% 3.75%
Role Playing 8.50% 4.25% 20.75% 7.25% 3.50% 13.00%
Simulation 18.50% 11.00% 24.25% 20.00% 8.00% 25.75%
Sports 7.75% 12.75% 7.00% 7.25% 8.25% 5.50%
Strategy 11.00% 12.00% 17.25% 9.50% 13.00% 15.50%
Trivia 2.50% 2.25% 1.25% 2.00% 1.50% 1.50%
Word 4.50% 5.25% 4.00% 4.25% 4.00% 2.50%

Again I’m using the theory that a low number in the Paid chart compared to Free/Grossing tends to indicate those categories where in-app purchase works well. For example, check the Role Playing category. 8.5% of free, 4.35% of Paid, versus a huge 20.75% chunk of the top grossing charts. This makes sense for all those people buying consumables to buy more seeds for their farm, +1 Vorpal Blades, etc. See also Adventure and Simulation. On the other hand, Sports, Arcade, and Action seem more evenly balanced. Also interesting are the Family, Kids, and Educational categories. These categories seem to be much more popular in the Free / Paid charts and I wonder it’s because parents tend to have App Store purchases password protected preventing restricting in app and direct purchases?

Moving over to the iPad you’ll see a pretty big increase in Educational, Puzzle, Family, and Kids games. While I’m sure there are more kids overall using these apps on iPhone, a greater percentage of iPad users tend to use educational / kids games.

And lastly you’ll notice that no one likes dice games. Anywhere.