Data study · iOS + Google Play · July 21, 2026
We crawled and indexed 4,348,551 apps across both major stores — 1,409,323 on Apple’s App Store and 2,939,228 on Google Play. Category, rating, install scale, price and the exact set of countries each app ships in. Here is what the mobile catalog really looks like.
4,348,551
apps indexed across both stores — one deduplicated record per app, per store.
1.4M
iOS App Store
2.9M
Google Play
Snapshot July 21, 2026 — the dataset is continuously enriched.
98.4%
of indexed apps are free — only 22,720 cost money. The App Store runs on ads, IAP and subscriptions, not up-front price.
75.8%
have zero ratings. The store is a long tail of apps almost nobody reviews; just 158 apps have crossed a million ratings.
Utilities
is the #1 category (152,626 apps), ahead of Games — matching the App Store’s own genre breakdown.
13.93
country storefronts per app on average. Only 512,922 apps are live in all 18; 12.8% are single-country.
Free vs paid — the whole catalog
Google Play is the bigger catalog by far — 2.9M apps to the App Store's 1.4M, roughly 2.1×. Both are overwhelmingly free and both rate high when rated at all, but Android carries a far longer unrated, low-install tail.
2,939,228 apps indexed
1,409,323 apps indexed
| Metric | App Store | Google Play |
|---|---|---|
| Apps indexed | 1,409,323 | 2,939,228 |
| Free | 98.4% | 97.4% |
| With ≥1 rating | 24.2% | 12.3% |
| Avg rating (rated) | 4.11★ | 4.04★ |
| Most popular app | 抖音 | WhatsApp Messenger |
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. The global leaderboard below skews toward whichever storefront happened to supply each app's canonical listing (often China, the catalog's single largest storefront) — switch to a country to see that market's own top apps.
Ranked by Popularity within United States.
| # | App | Category | Rating | Ratings | Popularity |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Walmart: Shopping & Savings | Shopping | 4.82★ | 18M | 85M |
| 2 | Venmo | Finance | 4.85★ | 15M | 75M |
| 3 | Capital One Mobile | Finance | 4.85★ | 11M | 52M |
| 4 | Wells Fargo Mobile® | Finance | 4.86★ | 11M | 51M |
| 5 | McDonald's | Food & Drink | 4.84★ | 7.7M | 37M |
| 6 | Intuit Credit Karma | Finance | 4.84★ | 7.6M | 37M |
| 7 | Domino's Pizza USA | Food & Drink | 4.78★ | 5.0M | 24M |
| 8 | OfferUp Buy & Sell Marketplace | Shopping | 4.75★ | 4.4M | 21M |
| 9 | Amex | Finance | 4.88★ | 4.3M | 21M |
| 10 | ADP Mobile Solutions | Business | 4.71★ | 4.3M | 20M |
| 11 | Pizza Hut - Delivery & Takeout | Food & Drink | 4.75★ | 4.2M | 20M |
| 12 | Chick-fil-A | Food & Drink | 4.93★ | 4.1M | 20M |
| 13 | Citi Mobile® | Finance | 4.88★ | 3.9M | 19M |
| 14 | Peacock TV: Stream TV & Movies | Entertainment | 4.66★ | 3.4M | 16M |
| 15 | The Home Depot | Shopping | 4.82★ | 3.3M | 16M |
Popularity = ratings count × average stars (“total rating weight”). Because rating counts span 0–52M while 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. Country view: apps ranked within the storefront whose metadata is their canonical record (see the dataset methodology below).
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 #7 by total Popularity — a huge pile of low-traction tools.
Engagement concentrates instead in Games (the most traction overall) and Finance, which reaches ~734M 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 44.6% of all rating weight; the top 1,000 hold 77.9%. 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 99.8% of all Popularity — the 1.6% of apps that charge capture almost none of the attention.
The most popular app in every category
| Category | Most popular app | Pop. |
|---|---|---|
| Games | 和平精英 | 66M |
| Finance | Venmo | 75M |
| Entertainment | 抖音 | 254M |
| Shopping | Walmart: Shopping & Savings | 85M |
| Food & Drink | McDonald's | 37M |
| Photo & Video | 剪映 - 抖音官方AI创作神器 | 104M |
| Utilities | 搜狗输入法-语音变声斗图表情 | 40M |
| Lifestyle | 交管12123 | 15M |
| Travel | Uber - Request a ride | 8.7M |
| Social Networking | WhatsApp Messenger | 19M |
| Productivity | 豆包 - 随时帮忙的 AI 助手 | 14M |
| Music | Spotify: Music and Podcasts | 23M |
| Book | 喜马拉雅「听书社区」电台有声小说相声评书 | 20M |
| Education | 一起作业（原一起小学学生） | 11M |
| Sports | FanDuel Sportsbook & Casino | 10M |
| Medical | CVS Health | 7.5M |
| Health & Fitness | 每日瑜伽-专业的瑜伽普拉提健身塑形APP | 2.6M |
| Business | Microsoft Teams | 2.6M |
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 — 19,626,904 (app, storefront) rows in total. The US store is the largest; coverage thins out across smaller markets.
| Canada (CA) | 1185021 |
| United Kingdom (GB) | 1157734 |
| Brazil (BR) | 1154003 |
| Japan (JP) | 1152055 |
| Australia (AU) | 1145046 |
| India (IN) | 1144693 |
| Mexico (MX) | 1143618 |
| New Zealand (NZ) | 1135643 |
| Türkiye (TR) | 1132190 |
| South Korea (KR) | 1122672 |
| Russia (RU) | 1115728 |
| Germany (DE) | 1047262 |
| Spain (ES) | 1038951 |
| Italy (IT) | 1038650 |
| Ireland (IE) | 1035183 |
| France (FR) | 1026506 |
| China (CN) | 1008428 |
| United States (US) | 843521 |
Apps indexed per storefront
How many storefronts is an app in?
Of the 22,720 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.
Google Play contributes 2,939,228 apps — 97.4% free, Education the biggest category. Play also exposes install counts, so we can rank by real reach: WhatsApp Messenger leads with 12042M installs.
| # | App | Category | Rating | Installs | Popularity |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | WhatsApp Messenger | Communication | 4.66★ | 12042M | 1105M |
| 2 | Social | 4.55★ | 11769M | 832M | |
| 3 | Social | 4.01★ | 7543M | 674M | |
| 4 | YouTube | Video Players & Editors | 3.87★ | 22795M | 660M |
| 5 | Free Fire: Fire Kickoff | Action | 4.31★ | 2104M | 553M |
| 6 | Messenger | Communication | 4.71★ | 7817M | 530M |
| 7 | Flipkart Online Shopping App | Shopping | 4.45★ | 979M | 329M |
| 8 | TikTok - Videos, Shop & LIVE | Social | 4.00★ | 4517M | 276M |
| 9 | Clash of Clans | Strategy | 4.49★ | 872M | 276M |
| 10 | Google Photos | Photography | 4.40★ | 14075M | 236M |
| 11 | ChatGPT | Productivity | 4.76★ | 1333M | 235M |
| 12 | Duolingo: Language Lessons | Education | 4.72★ | 928M | 220M |
Popularity = ratings count × average stars, the same cross-store metric used above. Installs are Google Play’s reported download buckets — a reach signal the App Store doesn’t publish.
Top Google Play categories
Apps by install bucket
1,409,323 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 July 21, 2026; re-running the indexer lifts every number. The independently-derived distributions (Utilities first, ~98.4% 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 | 152,626 |
| Education | 138,584 |
| Games | 138,191 |
| Business | 125,220 |
| Lifestyle | 115,113 |
| Health & Fitness | 102,641 |
| Productivity | 82,462 |
| Food & Drink | 72,812 |
| Finance | 67,643 |
| Shopping | 59,111 |
| Entertainment | 54,932 |
| Travel | 51,312 |
| Sports | 43,859 |
| Medical | 29,445 |
| Social Networking | 28,979 |
| Photo & Video | 28,762 |
| Music | 26,331 |
| Reference | 21,238 |
| Rating | Apps |
|---|---|
| 0.5★ | 0 |
| 1.0★ | 19,046 |
| 1.5★ | 6,306 |
| 2.0★ | 12,946 |
| 2.5★ | 10,191 |
| 3.0★ | 25,382 |
| 3.5★ | 23,251 |
| 4.0★ | 57,902 |
| 4.5★ | 76,663 |
| 5.0★ | 108,884 |
| Price band | Apps |
|---|---|
| < $1 | 2,925 |
| $1–3 | 5,499 |
| $3–5 | 3,669 |
| $5–10 | 3,967 |
| $10–20 | 1,591 |
| $20–50 | 920 |
| $50+ | 4,149 |
| Year | Apps |
|---|---|
| 2008 | 335 |
| 2009 | 2,529 |
| 2010 | 5,871 |
| 2011 | 9,251 |
| 2012 | 13,760 |
| 2013 | 18,066 |
| 2014 | 23,756 |
| 2015 | 33,904 |
| 2016 | 48,741 |
| 2017 | 51,841 |
| 2018 | 53,307 |
| 2019 | 65,094 |
| 2020 | 83,979 |
| 2021 | 93,533 |
| 2022 | 103,677 |
| 2023 | 125,834 |
| 2024 | 149,381 |
| 2025 | 232,855 |
| 2026 | 293,607 |
| 2027 | 2 |
| Ratings band | Apps |
|---|---|
| 0 ratings | 1,068,752 |
| 1–10 | 206,319 |
| 10–100 | 81,598 |
| 100–1K | 33,186 |
| 1K–10K | 13,412 |
| 10K–100K | 4,713 |
| 100K–1M | 1,185 |
| 1M+ | 158 |
| Top N apps | Share of all Popularity |
|---|---|
| Top 1 | 5.1% |
| Top 10 | 18.1% |
| Top 100 | 44.6% |
| Top 500 | 68.1% |
| Top 1,000 | 77.9% |
| Top 2,000 | 86.2% |
| Category | Total Popularity | Most popular app |
|---|---|---|
| Games | 1075M | 和平精英 |
| Finance | 734M | Venmo |
| Entertainment | 680M | 抖音 |
| Shopping | 672M | Walmart: Shopping & Savings |
| Food & Drink | 292M | McDonald's |
| Photo & Video | 289M | 剪映 - 抖音官方AI创作神器 |
| Utilities | 216M | 搜狗输入法-语音变声斗图表情 |
| Lifestyle | 172M | 交管12123 |
| Travel | 100M | Uber - Request a ride |
| Social Networking | 93M | WhatsApp Messenger |
| Productivity | 92M | 豆包 - 随时帮忙的 AI 助手 |
| Music | 85M | Spotify: Music and Podcasts |
| Book | 77M | 喜马拉雅「听书社区」电台有声小说相声评书 |
| Education | 76M | 一起作业（原一起小学学生） |
| Sports | 76M | FanDuel Sportsbook & Casino |
| Medical | 55M | CVS Health |
| Health & Fitness | 49M | 每日瑜伽-专业的瑜伽普拉提健身塑形APP |
| Business | 49M | Microsoft Teams |
| Storefronts | Apps |
|---|---|
| 1 storefront | 180,599 |
| 2 storefronts | 38,282 |
| 3 storefronts | 17,577 |
| 4 storefronts | 7,767 |
| 5 storefronts | 6,414 |
| 6 storefronts | 4,441 |
| 7 storefronts | 4,572 |
| 8 storefronts | 9,200 |
| 9 storefronts | 7,673 |
| 10 storefronts | 9,880 |
| 11 storefronts | 9,345 |
| 12 storefronts | 47,048 |
| 13 storefronts | 56,033 |
| 14 storefronts | 5,207 |
| 15 storefronts | 17,251 |
| 16 storefronts | 83,198 |
| 17 storefronts | 391,914 |
| 18 storefronts | 512,922 |
| Category | Apps |
|---|---|
| Education | 328,587 |
| Business | 266,869 |
| Tools | 238,400 |
| Productivity | 177,357 |
| Food & Drink | 173,436 |
| Lifestyle | 160,696 |
| Health & Fitness | 158,890 |
| Finance | 135,901 |
| Shopping | 123,220 |
| Entertainment | 109,830 |
| Music & Audio | 92,752 |
| Travel & Local | 85,807 |
| Install bucket | Apps |
|---|---|
| < 1K | 1,792,550 |
| 1K–10K | 554,968 |
| 10K–100K | 328,183 |
| 100K–1M | 147,183 |
| 1M–10M | 52,684 |
| 10M–100M | 12,223 |
| 100M–1B | 1,280 |
| 1B+ | 171 |
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. Google Play apps are discovered from Play’s sitemaps and hydrated from each app’s US-locale detail page; install buckets (android_max_installs) come from Play, which the App Store doesn’t expose.
“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 75.8% of the catalog is excluded from the 4.11★ figure. App counts reflect what is currently live, so historical release years under-count apps that have since been delisted.
Cite this
Crawlora (2026). Mobile App Dataset. 4,348,551 apps — 1,409,323 iOS across 18 storefronts and 2,939,228 Android; 98.4% / 97.4% free. https://crawlora.net/datasets/apps.
Around 2,387,501 apps are live on the App Store. Crawlora's dataset has indexed 1,409,323 of them (~59%) so far, across 18 country storefronts, and is continuously enriched.
98.4% of indexed apps are free — 1,386,603 free versus just 22,720 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 152,626 apps, ahead of Games (138,191) and Education. Games dominate revenue, but Utilities dominates app count — a common misconception.
Among apps that actually have ratings, the average is 4.11 stars, skewed toward 4–5★. But 75.8% of apps have no ratings at all (a score of 0 means unrated, not bad), so a naive average across every app is misleading.
13.93 of the 18 tracked storefronts, on average. Availability is uneven: 12.8% of apps ship in a single country, while only 512,922 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, 爱奇艺-《云秀行》逗趣不停歇 and 剪映 - 抖音官方AI创作神器. By category, Utilities leads on app count but only ranks #7 on total traction, while Games and Finance dominate engagement.
This dataset has 2,939,228 Google Play (Android) apps and 1,409,323 iOS App Store apps — 4,348,551 in total. Google Play is the larger catalog (~2.1× iOS), reflecting its lower publishing barrier and a much deeper long tail of low-install apps.
By Google Play install count the largest are WhatsApp Messenger (12042M installs), Facebook and Instagram. 61% of Android apps have under 1,000 installs, while only 171 have passed a billion — Google Play's reach is extremely concentrated.
Yes. The dataset is queryable through Crawlora's REST API (search iOS or Android apps by category, rating, price, storefront and more), and the App Store + Google Play endpoints return live app, reviews, ratings and chart data on demand. See the Datasets docs to get started.
Search 4,348,551 iOS & Android apps by category, rating, price or storefront, or pull live app, review, rating and chart data from both stores on demand through one REST API — clean JSON, no parsing, pay on success.