Which App Store categories are easiest to chart in

"Which category should I launch in" is usually answered with intuition, and the intuition is usually the same one: Games is impossible, Utilities is crowded, pick something niche. That is directionally fine and completely unactionable, because it does not tell you how much harder Games is than Medical, or which of two plausible categories for your app has the weaker incumbents.

This is measurable, and the measurement is simpler than it looks.

The measurement

For every category, we look at the apps currently on its top-100 free chart and ask how many ratings they carry. A category whose charting apps have six-figure rating counts is one where a new app is not going to displace anybody. A category where apps are charting with a few hundred ratings is one where a small app plausibly can.

Ranked easiest first, that looks like this:

What "median ratings" and "smallest charting" each tell you

They answer different questions, and the second one is the more useful of the two.

Median ratings is the middle of the pack — half the charting apps in that category have fewer ratings than this. It describes the category's general weight class.

Smallest charting is the fewest ratings of any app currently on that category's chart. This is the existence proof. It is the answer to "can an app as small as mine be on this chart at all", and unlike the median it cannot be dragged around by a handful of giants at the top.

If those two numbers are far apart, the category has a soft tail — a top dominated by large incumbents, but a bottom reachable by small apps. That is usually the most interesting shape to find.

The honest caveats

Rating count is a proxy for install base, not a measurement of it, and it is biased in ways you should know about before acting on this table:

• It favours older apps. Ratings accumulate and effectively never decay, so a five-year-old app with modest usage can out-rate a fast-growing one-year-old.
• Prompting culture varies by category. Games ask for ratings aggressively and at well-chosen moments; Medical and Finance apps typically do not. Some of the gap between those categories is behaviour, not size.
• It says nothing about revenue. An "easy" category can be easy precisely because there is not much money in it. Difficulty and opportunity are not the same axis, and this table only measures the first.

We use rating counts to order categories against each other, and never as a download number. That restriction is deliberate: we do not publish download or revenue estimates anywhere on this site, because we cannot calibrate them to a standard we would be willing to defend.

How to actually use this

If you are choosing between two categories your app genuinely fits, compare their smallest-charting numbers. That difference is real and it is the single most decision-relevant figure here.

If you are already live, this table tells you what charting would require, which is more useful than a ranking you cannot influence. Look up your category and compare your own rating count against the smallest charting app in it.

What it should not do is talk you into the wrong category. Apple's category guidelines matter, and reviewers do reject mismatches. An easy category you do not belong in is not a strategy — and a miscategorised app tends to convert badly even when it does chart, because the people browsing that shelf were not looking for it.

Go deeper on one category

Each category page carries the live chart, what moved this week, and how much of it turned over — the same data this table is built from, one level down:

• All 22 categories, ranked by movement
• Health & Fitness · Medical · Education
• Food & Drink · Books · Navigation

Related: how much of the top 100 changes each day, which is the other half of what makes a category reachable.