Data study · App Store · June 17, 2026
We crawled and indexed 1,103,554 iOS apps — about 46.2% of the 2.4M on the App Store — across 18 country storefronts. Every category, rating, price and the exact set of countries each app ships in. Here is what the catalog really looks like.
1,103,554
apps indexed across 18 storefronts — one deduplicated record each, with full availability.
98.6%
free
4.12★
avg (rated)
10M
availability rows
Snapshot June 17, 2026 — the dataset is continuously enriched.
98.6%
of indexed apps are free — only 15,963 cost money. The App Store runs on ads, IAP and subscriptions, not up-front price.
72%
have zero ratings. The store is a long tail of apps almost nobody reviews; just 148 apps have crossed a million ratings.
Utilities
is the #1 category (120,013 apps), ahead of Games — matching the App Store’s own genre breakdown.
9.43
country storefronts per app on average. Only 6,722 apps are live in all 18; 18.6% are single-country.
Free vs paid — the whole catalog
The App Store's app count is dominated by tools and everyday utilities. Games top the revenue charts, but by sheer number of titles they sit second — and education is a close third.
A star average alone is noise — 68% of apps are unrated, and a 5★ app with three reviews isn't beating a 4.7★ app with two million. So we rank by Popularity = ratings × stars (an app's total rating weight). It rewards proven adoption, not a lucky handful of reviews.
| # | App | Category | Rating | Ratings | Popularity |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 抖音 | Entertainment | 4.88★ | 52M | 254M |
| 2 | Spotify: Music and Podcasts | Music | 4.75★ | 6.7M | 193M |
| 3 | WhatsApp Messenger | Social Networking | 4.69★ | 18M | 85M |
| 4 | Walmart: Shopping & Savings | Shopping | 4.82★ | 18M | 85M |
| 5 | Venmo | Finance | 4.85★ | 15M | 75M |
| 6 | Messenger | Social Networking | 4.66★ | 13M | 59M |
| 7 | Capital One Mobile | Finance | 4.85★ | 11M | 52M |
| 8 | Wells Fargo Mobile® | Finance | 4.86★ | 11M | 51M |
| 9 | 抖音极速版 | Entertainment | 4.92★ | 9.5M | 47M |
| 10 | Amazon Shopping | Shopping | 4.83★ | 8.4M | 41M |
| 11 | Starbucks | Food & Drink | 4.89★ | 8.0M | 39M |
| 12 | 金铲铲之战 | Games | 4.64★ | 8.4M | 39M |
| 13 | McDonald's | Food & Drink | 4.84★ | 7.7M | 37M |
| 14 | Intuit Credit Karma | Finance | 4.84★ | 7.6M | 37M |
| 15 | 全民K歌-你其实很会唱歌 | Entertainment | 4.83★ | 6.4M | 31M |
Popularity = ratings count × average stars (“total rating weight”). Because rating counts span 0–52Mwhile stars span 0–5, this leaderboard is the catalog’s most-rated apps, lightly tilted by quality — a proven-adoption ranking, not a “best apps” one.
Total traction by category
This is where app count and app traction diverge sharply. Utilities leads the store by number of titles, yet ranks only #9 by total Popularity — a huge pile of low-traction tools.
Engagement concentrates instead in Games (the most traction overall) and Finance, which reaches ~686M of Popularity from a much smaller catalog — banking and payment apps have few titles but enormous, highly-rated user bases. The top of the leaderboard is almost entirely social, media, finance and shopping; the long tail of utilities never shows up.
Popularity follows a brutal power law. The top 100 apps — 0.03% of the rated catalog — hold 46.9% of all rating weight; the top 1,000 hold 78.3%. A million-app long tail splits what's left.
Share of all Popularity held by the top-N apps
It’s also a free-app world: free apps hold 99.7% of all Popularity — the 1.4% of apps that charge capture almost none of the attention.
The most popular app in every category
| Category | Most popular app | Pop. |
|---|---|---|
| Games | 金铲铲之战 | 39M |
| Finance | Venmo | 75M |
| Shopping | Walmart: Shopping & Savings | 85M |
| Entertainment | 抖音 | 254M |
| Food & Drink | Starbucks | 39M |
| Music | Spotify: Music and Podcasts | 193M |
| Social Networking | WhatsApp Messenger | 85M |
| Lifestyle | 交管12123 | 15M |
| Utilities | My Verizon | 26M |
| Photo & Video | 轻颜 - 记录美一刻 | 24M |
| Productivity | Yahoo Mail: Your Email & Inbox | 22M |
| Business | ADP Mobile Solutions | 20M |
| Education | 一起作业（原一起小学学生） | 11M |
| Sports | FanDuel Sportsbook & Casino | 10M |
| Travel | じゃらん | 5.4M |
| Health & Fitness | AllTrails: Hike, Bike & Run | 5.0M |
| Book | 喜马拉雅「听书社区」电台有声小说相声评书 | 20M |
| News | 16M |
New iOS apps by release year. After a plateau in the late 2010s, releases jumped again into the 2020s — 2025 alone added more apps to this index than any prior full year.
2026 is a partial year. Counts reflect apps currently in the catalog, so older years under-count apps that have since been removed.
Crawlora resolves each app against 18 country storefronts and records every one it's live in — 10,407,507 (app, storefront) rows in total. The US store is the largest; coverage thins out across smaller markets.
| United States (US) | 843309 |
| Canada (CA) | 602586 |
| India (IN) | 588286 |
| Japan (JP) | 587059 |
| United Kingdom (GB) | 585412 |
| Brazil (BR) | 584806 |
| Türkiye (TR) | 577921 |
| Mexico (MX) | 577555 |
| Australia (AU) | 576630 |
| Russia (RU) | 575702 |
| New Zealand (NZ) | 574215 |
| South Korea (KR) | 562642 |
| Spain (ES) | 539666 |
| Germany (DE) | 537565 |
| Italy (IT) | 533768 |
| Ireland (IE) | 529111 |
| France (FR) | 522011 |
| China (CN) | 509263 |
Apps indexed per storefront
How many storefronts is an app in?
Of the 15,963 paid apps, most sit in the classic $0.99–$4.99 band. A small premium tail charges $50 or more — pro tools, niche utilities and one-off purchases.
1,103,554 unique apps, 18 storefronts, continuously enriched
Industry estimate of total live iOS apps, mid-2026
Crawlora discovers apps from Apple’s own app sitemaps, then resolves each one against every tracked storefront — so coverage grows automatically as the crawl runs. The figures on this page are a live snapshot from June 17, 2026; re-running the indexer lifts every number. The independently-derived distributions (Utilities first, ~98.6% free, ratings skewed to 4–5★) line up with Apple’s published genre and free/paid breakdowns — a useful accuracy check.
The same figures behind the charts above, as plain HTML tables — easy to copy, and machine-readable for search engines and AI answer engines that can't parse a chart.
| Category | Apps |
|---|---|
| Utilities | 120,013 |
| Games | 111,118 |
| Education | 107,900 |
| Business | 95,366 |
| Lifestyle | 87,463 |
| Health & Fitness | 80,241 |
| Productivity | 62,352 |
| Finance | 54,790 |
| Food & Drink | 54,289 |
| Shopping | 45,887 |
| Entertainment | 44,095 |
| Travel | 41,152 |
| Sports | 34,609 |
| Photo & Video | 23,655 |
| Medical | 22,998 |
| Social Networking | 22,276 |
| Music | 21,427 |
| Reference | 17,519 |
| Rating | Apps |
|---|---|
| 0.5★ | 0 |
| 1.0★ | 17,009 |
| 1.5★ | 5,270 |
| 2.0★ | 11,630 |
| 2.5★ | 8,903 |
| 3.0★ | 22,502 |
| 3.5★ | 21,224 |
| 4.0★ | 53,758 |
| 4.5★ | 76,160 |
| 5.0★ | 92,099 |
| Price band | Apps |
|---|---|
| < $1 | 2,144 |
| $1–3 | 3,785 |
| $3–5 | 2,671 |
| $5–10 | 2,809 |
| $10–20 | 1,078 |
| $20–50 | 643 |
| $50+ | 2,833 |
| Year | Apps |
|---|---|
| 2008 | 302 |
| 2009 | 2,248 |
| 2010 | 5,244 |
| 2011 | 8,165 |
| 2012 | 12,059 |
| 2013 | 15,730 |
| 2014 | 20,496 |
| 2015 | 28,906 |
| 2016 | 41,171 |
| 2017 | 43,855 |
| 2018 | 45,012 |
| 2019 | 54,713 |
| 2020 | 69,649 |
| 2021 | 76,893 |
| 2022 | 85,265 |
| 2023 | 101,619 |
| 2024 | 119,360 |
| 2025 | 185,663 |
| 2026 | 187,204 |
We enumerate the App Store from Apple’s published app sitemaps, then hydrate every discovered app id through the iTunes lookup API against 18 country storefronts. Records are deduplicated to one document per app, accumulating the set of countries each app is available in — so an app on six stores is a single record, not six rows. Metadata (category, score, ratings count, price, release date) comes from the storefront response; English-storefront values are preferred for the canonical title.
“Average rating” here is computed over rated apps only — a stored score of 0 means an app has no ratings yet, not a one-star app, so 72% of the catalog is excluded from the 4.12★ figure. App counts reflect what is currently live, so historical release years under-count apps that have since been delisted.
Cite this
Crawlora (2026). App Store Dataset. 1,103,554 iOS apps across 18 storefronts; 98.6% free, 4.12★ average among rated apps. https://crawlora.net/datasets/apps.
Around 2,387,501 apps are live on the App Store. Crawlora's dataset has indexed 1,103,554 of them (~46.2%) so far, across 18 country storefronts, and is continuously enriched.
98.6% of indexed apps are free — 1,087,591 free versus just 15,963 paid. That tracks the App Store's own ~95% free share; the catalog skews even freer because it includes the long tail of obscure free apps.
Utilities is the largest category with 120,013 apps, ahead of Games (111,118) and Education. Games dominate revenue, but Utilities dominates app count — a common misconception.
Among apps that actually have ratings, the average is 4.12 stars, skewed toward 4–5★. But 72% of apps have no ratings at all (a score of 0 means unrated, not bad), so a naive average across every app is misleading.
9.43 of the 18 tracked storefronts, on average. Availability is uneven: 18.6% of apps ship in a single country, while only 6,722 reach all 18. Crawlora records each app once with the full set of storefronts it's live in.
We rank by Popularity = ratings count × average stars — an app's total rating weight — which rewards proven adoption over a high average from a tiny sample. The most popular apps in the dataset are 抖音, Spotify: Music and Podcasts and WhatsApp Messenger. By category, Utilities leads on app count but only ranks #9 on total traction, while Games and Finance dominate engagement.
Yes. The dataset is queryable through Crawlora's REST API (search by category, rating, price, storefront and more) and the App Store endpoints return live app, reviews, ratings and chart data on demand. See the Datasets docs to get started.
Search 1,103,554 apps by category, rating, price or storefront, or pull live app, review, rating and chart data on demand through one REST API — clean JSON, no parsing, pay on success.