App Store Popularity-What makes a good app?
Apple and Android both have their own virtual stores where users may go on and download tens of thousands of free or paid apps. Having both stores online and active for years now, lots of apps succeeded, and lots have fallen.
Since phones and tablets become increasingly more obtainable and affordable, there has been surge in demand for new and innovative apps to tend to peoples needs. For a new app developer, one may ask the question “what makes an app popular? & what platform should I work on?”. Well, let’s go and find out.
Firstly, let’s look at each app store and see, what are the popular app on there. To find that out, we’ll make a graph
This apple app store data set gave us approx 7.1k rows of information. About half of them are video games for people to play, quickly showing that their main focus is providing games for all to play. Lets see what it looks like without the games category.
That’s better! Now without the games category the biggest category would be Entertainment followed by Education. Now lets see what androids have it.
As you can see the difference from the categories is that Googleplay’s categories have “family” as the dominate. As you’ll see in a little, games that are family friendly are categorized as “family” and as a result, “games” are still technically still the dominant category
This is the distribution of ratings. It shows the rate at which rating is the most used when rating the apps. The data set only included absolutes of 1 or 0.5 so we see spikes in this graph, but once you see the android version, you’ll see that they resemble each other somewhat
With the Google Play Store, you can see it is similar with Apple’s App Store just smoother. There is a slight difference with that there is more lower rating scores but not by a significant amount
We can see that the most rated games on the market for apple are video games(as said previously) We can also see that just because they’re the most popular, their ratings are all around 4.5.
Now if you see, the category is stated as “family” but we are getting video games. My theory is that if you look at the content ratings, you’ll see that its everyone or teens. This is in the area of family friendly content, therefore giving the games the category of “family”.Lastly, we can still see that the most played and reviewed apps are still averaging at 4.5.
Now let’s take a look at the distribution of the rating among the ratings
This graph is showing where all the apps are in terms of reviews. Most of the app ratings are well below 500,000 and only a very small portion of apps on the store actually have more than 1mil reviews.
Google Play shows a very similar outcome, as the vast majority of their apps have well below 1mil reviews
These graphs above prove that well-known apps will get a lot more reviews than lesser well-known ones. Just because you have low numbers of reviews doesn’t necessarily mean that you will be rated poorly
In Conclusion, from what the data is presenting, if you’d want to make a strong pick to be a successful app, you’d need to make one along the lines of making a free & family friendly casual game.