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.
Thank u!
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Hi,
This info is really helpful. You have a breakdown of revenue for games by category. Can you please let me know what was the source of it. It would be really helpful to me
Thanks,
Nihar
Sure Nihar, I created a script to parse the RSS feeds generated at http://itunes.apple.com/us/rss and broke each down by category, placed the results in a database then examined them.
Casey, this is awesome! I checked out the RSS feed you linked, but couldn’t figure out how you parsed the game sub-category. I could only get it tell me “Game”. Mind sharing how you got it to spit out the sub-category, like Arcade, Puzzle, etc?
Not exactly sure where I found them, but these are the IDs I have for the game sub-categories:
const kCategory_Games_Action = 7001;
const kCategory_Games_Adventure = 7002;
const kCategory_Games_Arcade = 7003;
const kCategory_Games_Board = 7004;
const kCategory_Games_Card = 7005;
const kCategory_Games_Casino = 7006;
const kCategory_Games_Dice = 7007;
const kCategory_Games_Education = 7008;
const kCategory_Games_Family = 7009;
const kCategory_Games_Kids = 7010;
const kCategory_Games_Music = 7011;
const kCategory_Games_Puzzle = 7012;
const kCategory_Games_Racing = 7013;
const kCategory_Games_RolePlaying = 7014;
const kCategory_Games_Simulation = 7015;
const kCategory_Games_Sports = 7016;
const kCategory_Games_Strategy = 7017;
const kCategory_Games_Trivia = 7018;
const kCategory_Games_Word = 7019;
So, for example, this would be a link to the top 10 free arcade games in JSON format: https://itunes.apple.com/us/rss/topfreeapplications/limit=10/genre=7003/json
Very cool. Thanks a lot, Casey!