I presume no one outside Apple knows for sure, and it is something that constantly changes to a degree. I can take a guess. Our flagship productivity app LifeTopix is mostly 5-star rated, has a base price of $4.99 and offers in-apps. So it is obviously at a higher price-point than what you've asked. Here's what we've noticed in the last few months.

This is for our category: Paid Productivity on iPad. Our app is universal - single purchase works on both devices, but I mostly track rankings on the iPad, since it is our primary target device. Also, about 90% of our sales are in the US.

1. When we are ranked around 100, we typically have 35 daily sales.
2. When we are ranked around 50, we typically have 70 daily sales.
3. At our highest rating around 35, we had about 200 downloads.
4. When we made it free for a day we were ranked 2nd in iPad Free Productivity, we had about 25,000 downloads that day. We were only behind Google Drive, which had been released that week and was very popular, otherwise we'd been #1 in Free Productivity on iPad. But that's free - my estimate is free apps are downloaded 2-3 times more than paid ones in any given category.

So with some gut feel and fuzzy math, my estimate for Paid Productivity on iPad is this, assuming a decent app with good ratings:

Top 5: 5,000+ daily downloads
Top 10: 2,000+ daily downloads
Top 20: 1000+ daily downloads
Top 25: 500+ daily downloads
Top 35: 200+ daily downloads
Top 50: 75+ daily downloads
Top 100: 50+ daily downloads
Top 200: 25+ daily downloads

Like Julia mentioned earlier, this all depends on the category, and also on the device. I believe nowadays Paid Productivity category is second only to paid Games category.

My guess is, to answer your question, 2500 downloads should get you in the US top 25 paid apps (across all categories), and top 8 in your own category.

I hope this is useful - most of this is guesswork and estimates.

Adi

With AppFollow you can monitor App Store reviews, ratings and rankings across all the countries your mobile game or app is available in.

Here are some details about the data you can get with our tools:

• Ratings and reviews monitoring: you can get full App Store review analysis (sentiments, geo, version, topic) and be aware of any issues and queries.

• Reply to reviews: you can receive and reply to all users reviews in your favorite helpdesk or communication platform — Slack, Zendesk, Helpshift, Discord & 30+ other integrations. No need to switch to another tab or search for the required review.
• Reviews updates and rating changes: we will notify you when users change their reviews. You will see the reviews history and will be able to follow up on them within seconds.
• Ranking changes: With our ASO tools you can keep an eye on app ranking changes and receive instant alerts when your or competitors’ app ranking changes.

I hope it’s helpful. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to contact me or my team.

Hey, thanks for the question.

There are many things that affect your app ranking, so you’ll need to work on each of them to see some results.

• Meta data: icons, screenshots, title, description, keywords. I’d recommend to target not the most popular keywords, but go for either the branded ones (if your brand is well known) or to target those that are somewhere in the middle with their popularity. This will especially work well if you are a new app. Why middle positions? You won't have to compete with already popular apps, but will still get your piece of a pie. You also can use suggestion for keywords that are used by your competitors, that are trending and so on. You can find those in ASO tools like AppFollow.

• Number of downloads over time. Here the more you get the higher you rank. Also check that you don’t get a drastic number of uninstalls — this won’t do you a favour.
• Product performance: app crushes, retention, etc
• App rating. You’ll need to carefully work with your reviews to increase it. Go through all the negative ones and find out why users weren’t happy with your app. You can fix them or if they are unfair simply report them and Google Play Store will delete them. This will increase your rating. We at AppFollow have a tool for managing your ratings and reviews. It will help you automate your work with reviews and save a ton of your time.
• App updates. If you update your app often it will indicate bug fixes and new feature release. Don’t do it too often, find your own pace. Also, don’t do it just for sake of updating it. It won’t work anyway. You need to solve user problems with every update whether it is a performance issue or improved UI.

Hope this helps!

Disclaimer: I’m the CEO of AppFollow.

What sort of App Store trends do you need to analyze? We at 42matters have been monitoring a number of App Store trends for a while now, so our Explorer and APIs might be of service!

The Explorer, which is free for 14 days, is an app market research tool that provides in-depth insight into both the Apple App Store and Google Play.

The Explorer offers:

• App rating trends
• App developer details
• App download history
• App rankings
• And more

Here’s a screen-grab from the Explorer:

If you’re not after all the bells and whistles, our APIs are also great for monitoring app store trends and import the data automatically into your system. They facilitate programmatic access to app intelligence data from both Google Play and the Apple App Store, as well as the Apple TV App Store, Fire TV, the Roku Channel Store, and more.

Hope you found this useful! Let me know if you want to chat. I’d be happy to walk you through everything.

Absolutely! If you’re looking for the rating history of an Android app that you developed, then your best bet would be the Google Play Console. iOS apps are a little trickier.

Your best option for iOS apps (or to see how your competitors are doing) is to find a third-party app intelligence provider. At 42matters.com, for instance, we provide a variety of rating and review insights, via file dumps, APIs, and our 42matters Explorer platform. This includes historical ratings for both iOS and Android apps. Check it out, here’s Instagram's average rating over the past 4 months (from the Explorer):

And Instagram’s ratings by stars over the same time period:

That said, if you want something a little more light-weight, our Advanced Query API will give you access to complete rating and review data for any Android or iOS app, including total rating and rating for the current version of the app. Here’s an example request/response:

Finally, our App Details File Dumps can also give you information about app ratings. This includes rating insights for apps available on Google Play, the Apple App Store, Amazon Appstore, Tencent MyApp, Apple TV tvOS App Store, Amazon Fire TV, the Roku Channel Store, and more.

Hope this helped! Let us know if you have any questions about our app intelligence tools.

While no one can say with 100% certainty how the app store algorithm works, you can help your app stay on top of the changes and not lose its ranking. Because of our billions of data points coming in daily and our crack data science team at Mobile Action, we are one of the first to notice such changes and notify our users about it. for example, we watched as Uber and Clash of Clan's keywords took a steep dive in early November and realized Apple had changed their algorithm once again.

Our advice:

1. Pick your app category and sub-categories carefully. There are a couple ways to figure out how Apple will categorize your app. First, check out the Explore feature in the App Store and find out which categories your app and similar apps are listed in. This feature still doesn’t cover all of the apps in the store, which is we make this second suggestion: check out your competitor’s apps to find out which keywords have started ranking automatically after the changes.
2. Focus only on the most relevant and important keywords in your app name.
3. Use your keyword spot to create long tail keyword phrases.
4. A/B test your app icon, screenshots, app preview and description for better search conversion.

5. Get more and positive user reviews

You may also want to check out our blog series, posts 1, 2, and 3, which give more detail on Apple algorithm changes and how to make the most of them for your app. Good luck!

Definitely! At 42matters.com, for instance, we provide a number of solutions that can help you keep track of competitor downloads. The most popular tends to be our Explorer platform, which enables you to track daily, weekly, monthly, or total downloads for any iOS or Android app.

Check it out, here are the daily downloads by country for the Android version of WhatsApp (notice the total downloads on the upper left hand side of the image):

You can even choose which countries you’re interested in following:

While estimated total downloads reflect the entire app lifetime, the historical app download estimates feature on the Explorer goes back as far as one year.

However, if you’re looking for something with a little more flexibility, I suggest looking into our APIs. In particular, our App Download Estimates History API. These are available for both iOS and Android apps. Also, our App Details File Dump provides download estimates for iOS and Android apps from as far back as 5 years.

Hope this helped! Let me know if you have any further questions.

Hey, thanks for your question.
You can use AppFollow to find app data on ranking, ratings and reviews for any apps and downloads and revenue for your app. You can also set up an integration with Slack, email or any help desk service to receive reports on changes of app rating, keywords, ranking and reviews daily.

• You can also look for specific keywords and apps that rank by it, keywords popularity and historical data.

• Also, you can find all reviews with division by country, version, language and more

Disclaimer: I’m the CEO of AppFollow

I did a bit of research into this when we were attempting to aggregate all of the comments for the Facebook iPhone app (currently over 6,500 comments across all versions).

The iTunes store serves all of its content over the web in xml format, so with some basic network traffic monitoring we can quickly find the source of the data. If you look at the requests iTunes makes when fetching a page of comments, you'll see the following important information sent in the header:

User-Agent: iTunes/9.1 (Macintosh; Intel Ma 10.6.3) AppleWebKit/531.21.11

...as well as the following piece of data that identifies the store front you are curious about: X-Apple-Store-Front: 143455-6,5. This is for the Canadian store. Some other people have taken the time to put a list of these ids together [1].

The URL that's hit to access the comments is similar to this one: http://ax.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/customerReviews?update=1&id=284882215&displayable-kind=11&page-number=2&sort-key=1

Where id is your app id, and page-number is, well, you get the drill.

With a little bit of beautiful soup you can easily grab all of your app's comments. I won't go into the details of parsing XML here.

Sources:
[1] http://blogs.oreilly.com/iphone/2008/08/scraping-appstore-reviews.html

Hi there,

You could try App Radar Keyword Tracker. App Radar is an online tool that helps app developers understand and optimize their app store appearance. It comes with useful keyword tracking & research functionality and is the first tool that lets them publish and manage app store listings for both Google Play & Apple App Store in one place. It lets app owners use the full potential of their app to get it to more users.

Hope it was helpful!

Disclaimer: I am the CEO of App Radar. We create solutions to optimize your app publishing process and make it easier to optimize your apps for a higher visibility within the app stores. If you have any further questions, you can contact me anytime :)

The formula is as such:
[weighted sales in the past 1-4 days + weighted sales in the past 1-4 hours + your star rating + revenue generated + user engagement]

That said, each piece above has been weighted within the formula itself. In fact, the vast majority of the weight is in the first two components (sales... Or better stated as "downloads"). Earlier Last year this formula was much simpler. It merely accounted for downloads over the past week. The most recent component was added earlier this year, the weighted sales (or "downloads") in the past 1-4 hours. This is why more recently you can see apps moving MUCH more quickly in the rankings on the AppStore up and down the charts. Rankings are much less stagnant and now far more susceptible to hourly fluctuations in downloads.

Now to examine Android's Google Play market ranking algorithm is much different. For example, it additionally takes into account such things as SEO, etc.

If you want the most recent possible stats, or near real-time insights, then your best bet would be to find a service that specializes in app intelligence and app market insights.

At 42matters for instance, we track a host of country-specific app statistics. These include app publishers by country, apps by country, average app ratings by country, the breakdown of apps vs games by country, average app downloads by country, and more. For instance, in the United States:

• There are 41,506 app publishers
• There are 175,663 apps (86% of which are apps, 14% of which are games)
• Apps average 1.34 million downloads

We offer similar info for: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Egypt, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Poland, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Thailand, Turkey, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and Vietnam.

Moreover, the 42matters Explorer, our flagship app market research tool, will enable you to see all apps available in Google Play and the Apple App Store by country.

Check it out, here’s the country availability filter in action:

And the top 10 apps available in the US version of Google Play, ranked according to downloads:

To start researching country availability...

1. Register for a 14-day free trial on our website
2. Activate your account and launch ‘Explorer’
3. Select either ‘Android Apps’ or ‘iOS Apps’ from the ‘Explorer’ section of the ‘Launchpad’
4. Tick the box next to ‘Country Availability’ in the ‘Localization’ section
5. Select the countries of interest to calculate the number of apps available in each one

Aside from the Explorer, you can get similar data from either our Advanced Query API or our Country Availability API. Check it out, here’s an example query from the Advanced Query API:

And from the Country Availability API. Here’s an example request:

And example response:

Hope this helped! Let me know if you have any questions or if you need any assistance.

Hi,

Thank you for your question!

You can check these guides on how to improve your ASO (SEO for apps) game:

How to Optimize App Visibility in Stores. A Guide to ASO

ASO: how to increase game installs by 53% per day in Google Play

ASO or App Store Optimization is a super cost-effective way to increase the exposure of your app in stores and boost your app or game downloads. Basically, ASO is same as SEO but it works for mobile apps. What does ASO consist of and what should you do first?

1. Choose the right title

ASO should cover everything you do in the app store and it should start at the very beginning with choosing the title of your game. If it is a made-up name then you should aim to build a brand around it. Alternatively, based on the type of game you are creating, the title could be composed of strategic keywords.

2. Optimize visual assets for Browse and Search

Browse and Search are the biggest source of mobile game installs in the App Store and visual optimization (icon, screenshots, and a preview video) plays a huge role in conversions for this group. At a glance, your app icon and screenshots should enable app store users to understand what your game is about and why it’s so great. Combined with attractive, bright annotations and calls to action, screenshots should showcase players what their experience with the game will be after they download it.

3. Write proper description

The AppStore description doesn’t influence any keywords ranking but it affects downloads conversion rate as a user can read your description and decide whether he or she needs this app or game or not.

4. Test and Iterate

ASO experts advise that A/B testing should be done strategically and regularly, focusing more on the quality of the tests than the quantity of them. Always keep your finger on the pulse of your app relevant keywords especially.

5. Reply to reviews on app stores

Many game developers mistakenly believe that ASO is all about keywords and visual assets. In reality, ratings and reviews are another important factor influencing app store performance. A higher rate will help you to rank in AppStore search ads too.

I am a CEO of AppFollow - don’t hesitate to ask any related questions, our team is always happy to help you to perform better and better in app stores!

There are several components to the algorithm, most of which are unknown. We know that the algorithm uses a weighted average of daily applications sales. Most of the weight is placed on the 4 previous days of sales and nearly none of the weight is placed on days before that. You can determines the weight coefficients for the 4-day weighted average using data on your ranking and sales and least squares analysis. In order for the weighted average method to be accurate, you have to normalize your sales volume to the total app store sales volume. Sales volume over the weekend is greater than the weekdays.

Applications are not ranked based upon units sold, but rather on revenue. This is because large video game companies such as EA lobbied apple and felt they were disadvantaged compared to indie developers because they were pricing their games at $10 and selling fewer units but receiving greater revenues than lower priced games. Therefore Apple changed the ranking system to be based upon revenue generation rather than total number of units sold. It also makes sense for apple to do this because the Apps that are making Apple the most money are then the ones featured at the top of the rankings.

If app makers would share sales data with each other we would have more information about application rankings and we could each make decisions based upon the data that would improve each of our applications sales. Its very disappointing however that the community is not doing this.

I would like to correct that the App Store uses only revenue. There are 3 ranking types: Top Paid, Top Free, and Top Grossing. These categories fall under iPhone and/or iPad App Store. Each app category (i.e. business, productivity, games, etc.) also has its sub-ranking.

Top Grossing chart is the one that uses the revenue generated by the app sales. The more revenue an app generates, the higher the rank on the Top Grossing chart. For example, a $10 app is sold 10 times ($100 total) and a $1 app is sold 15 times. Then, the $10 app would rank higher in this chart.

On the other hand, Top Free and Top Paid are based on the number of downloads. Top Free is self-explanatory. The more downloads means higher rank. In the Top Paid chart, the $1 app would rank higher in the above scenario.

Hi there,

Here are some of the factors that affects app rank. You can learn all of these points and more from this 10 minute compact ASO guide :

1. Title of the app - Should include keyword you want to rank for.
2. Description - Your description should include your keyword, features and it should be authentic.
3. Number of Downloads - Total number of downloads is one of the big factors.
4. Frequency of downloads - How quickly your app gets downloads is also one of the factors.
5. Deep linking - Structure of your app also affects the ranking of an app.
6. Category of app - Ranking in gaming and social category is much harder than ranking in finance and productivity categories.
7. User Experience/ User Interface : These two factors are considered one of the most valuable factors in ranking.
8. App reviews and ratings : Positive reviews and rating affects app ranking a lot. Frequency of these two affects rankings as well.
9. In app time : How much time people spend on your app is also a very important ranking factor.
10. Retention rate : How many people come back to your time and time again is another factor.

I hope this helped.
Keep Optimizing
:)

Disclaimer: I am the CEO of App Radar. If you have any further questions, you can contact me anytime :)

Apple provides IOS developers with a platform to display their apps to more app users and compete with other developers. To measure if the app is useful among app users, Apple has its own algorithm as follows:

1. Length of use, duration, retention app staytime, uninstall
2. App searches
3. App downloads
4. Ratings and reviews

The factors above have different proportion in the algorithm.

Previously, the App Store took into account download volumes and velocity as the two largest factors that determined an app’s rank. Apps’ ranks would update every 15 minutes, allowing developers to really see the impact of their new installs.

Later, to to identify “short download bursts,” and help prevent app developers from using automated means to game the App Store charts, Apple put more focus on how well consumers actually like the app. And good/good reviews come into play. So app positions are changing every three hours on the consumer-facing App Store.

Now, downloads and good reviews are not enough to better measure an app. The Keyword Search comes to stage and becomes much more important in Apple algorithm. Users' organic keyword search, downloads and reviews count a lot.

For developers, it is not like "Hey, why don't you come here trymyapps" then the users would come for downloading. To market an app, it is always a long way for developers not only to improve the app quality, but also to know how to sell their products to the targeted users. And that is why most developers are trying so hard to get Keyword Optimization and other ASO techniques.

It is tough. However, Apple has a few positions like Best New Game list for an app that has new idea or totally different design. It is in favor of indie developers, to some degree.

So overall, Apple algorithm changes time to time. The app ranking position changes along with the changing algorithm.

A universal app really doesn't matter much in rankings on the app store. Ideally, this decision to build a universal app should be based on app & user's advantage instead of getting better rankings. A universal app provides some advantages:

• its good for end-user as one gets two apps for price of one. If your iPhone and iPad app offer different functionality based on device, a real boon for the customer.
• once you update more popular version for your app, downloads increase with the update and could help ranking for once.
• promotions become easier as for universal apps as you promote and share a single URL instead of two.

Important aspects to consider before choosing to go ahead with a universal app:

• Competition, if majority of the top ranking competition is providing a universal app, then its a norm in your category.
• Pricing, since you got to sell at a common price choose the price cautiously as the iPhone apps are a tad cheaper than iPad apps
• Customers' need for having the same app on two devices for instance Evernote is an app I would like to have on all my devices including the desktop and it would definitely be bad marketing to not to offer a Universal app at one price. On the other hand a picture viewing travel Atlas would be more suited for big screen iPads and I may never use the iPhone version.
• Cost of development a universal app, viz a viz having two apps