Distimo: Survey shows that the top 25 of the App Store free list need 40,000 daily downloads

For mobile developers, the importance of ranking in the top 25 on Apple's iTunes App Store cannot be overstated. After all, the top 25 ranking is perhaps the most important app discovery mechanism for most iOS users. However, how many downloads are needed to enter the top 25? Distimo, a mobile app store analysis agency, released an interesting set of data to answer this question. In the top 25 of the total ranking on the US App Store, the current number of downloads for free iPhone apps is 38,400 times a day, and the number of downloads for paid apps is 3,530 times. If you want to enter the top 25 in each category, the number of downloads will be much smaller. However, games will be the most competitive category, with free apps requiring 25,300 downloads per day and paid apps requiring 2,280 downloads.

For some free apps, the most competitive categories outside of games are: entertainment (6,700 daily downloads), social networking (5,800), lifestyle (3,900), and music (3,900). For weather apps, 300 downloads are enough to enter the top 25. Interestingly, on the paid app list, drawing apps are ranked third, only after "games" and "entertainment". However, to enter the top 25 in this category, the daily download volume is only 270.

Figure 1: Daily downloads of the top 25 free apps in each category on the App Store. (Unit: Thousand)

Across categories, the top 25 free games received an average of 13 times more downloads than the top 25 paid games. However, there were some differences within each category. For example, consumers in the Weather (9x) and Education (9x) categories were more likely to pay for apps.

Figure 2: Daily downloads of the top 25 paid apps in each category on the App Store. (Unit: Thousand)

Competition in the most popular categories on the App Store is fierce. To enter the top 25 in the game category, the daily download volume must reach 25,300. Among them, the most popular game categories are arcade games and action games, with daily download volumes of 8,400 and 7,800 respectively. Puzzle and simulation games rank second with 5,800 and 4,400 downloads respectively.

Among paid games, the number of downloads required to enter the top 25 is slightly lower than that of free games, but the number of daily downloads is also 22,800. Among the game sub-categories, the most popular game is action games (8,500), followed by arcade games (7,200). The third and fourth places are puzzle games (4,900) and adventure games (3,400). Music games require the least number of daily downloads to enter the top 25, only 200.

Of course, these numbers are constantly changing, and this is just the data Distimo collected during its research last month. However, some industry insiders have disputed Distimo's numbers, believing that these numbers are too low and can only represent data from a small number of applications.

At the end of 2011, Distimo released a report stating that the top 25 free games had at least 45,000 downloads per day. However, in the first half of this year, Apple cracked down on all kinds of fake and machine-automated downloads of apps without real users to help developers rush to the top of the list - of course, real users will naturally find you in the top 25. Judging from the latest data from Distimo, these measures taken by Apple have been effective and are expected to make it easier for real developers to make money.