Understanding App Store Top 100s

Understanding the unique ways the app store works is critical in deciding app store marketing tactics and understanding the spikes and drops in app sales figures. This article explores how the top 100 lists in the app store work, and a future posting will look at how this applies to real sales data.

Top 100 lists.

Apple tracks the popularity of apps and ranks them in lists of top 100 apps. These are the ‘Top Paid’ and ‘Top Free’ lists you see when you browse the app store. The exact method is known only to Apple, but it seems that Apple measures app popularity by unit downloads over the last day, perhaps using a weighted method where downloads from previous days have a decaying influence on ranking. There are many ways that customers can find apps, eg searching iTunes, Google search, app review websites, word or mouth, ads in other apps, etc, but it’s clear that browsing the top 100 lists in the app store is very important app discovery method. Several developers have reported greatly increased sales when an app is in a top 100 list, and greatly reduced sales when their app slips off the bottom of a top 100 list. The two most important top 100 lists are top 100 paid apps and top 100 free apps, and then there are top 100 free and top 100 paid lists for each category and subcategory of games. In addition to the top 100 lists there are listings of apps by release date. Every one of these lists is maintained independently for every iTunes country, so an app that’s very popular in one country and in several top 100 lists for that country might be totally missing from the top 100 lists in other countries.

Browsing the App Store on the iPhone or iPod touch

The app store app on the iPhone or iPod touch opens to the last application tab that you were using: Featured, Categories, Top 25, Search, or Updates. On the top 25 tab you can see either the free or paid top 25 apps, selecting free or paid with the toolbar at the top. When if first opens it will default to whichever of free or paid you were looking at last. 5 apps fit on the screen at once, so in fact to begin with you see top 5. Scrolling down through 5 screens worth gets you the whole top 25. At the bottom of the table is a link to ‘Show top 50′, taping this gets 25 more apps added to the table, so you can scroll through the top 50 free or paid. At the end of 50 there’s no link to see more, so on the device you can’t see the entire top 100 overall apps, only the top 50.

Via the Categories tab you can browse the top 100 paid and free lists for each category. Tapping on a particular category opens that categories top paid list as a table. The table has 25 apps listed, and at the bottom is a link ‘Twenty Five More…’. You can use that 3 times to get the table to show the full top 100 list. The toolbar at the top of the table switches between the top paid, top free, and listing apps by release date. Note that the table always opens showing the top paid list when you go into a category, it doesn’t remember if you were last viewing top paid, top free, or by release date. Note that this is different to iTunes on the desktop, which defaults its category view to release date. When viewing by release date, you can keep tapping the ‘Twenty Five More…’ link and get up to 350 apps listed.

Browsing in iTunes on the Desktop

In the App Store page in iTunes, the middle of the screen is full of special areas ‘New and Noteworthy’, ‘What’s Hot’ etc that the iTunes editorial team uses to promote apps it has hand picked. The overall top 10 paid apps is shown in the right column, and underneath that the overall top 10 free apps. (Note how paid gets billing over free, though headline billing is in the hand picked areas in the middle, which can include paid and free). Clicking on one of the top 100 links goes to a page that shows all top on screen.

On the left side of the main app store screen is the list of categories. Clicking on a category goes to thats categories app listing (screen shot below). When this page opens it lists the apps by release date. So here’s why the app release date is important – release date is the default view of an app store category in iTunes on the desktop. It’s possible to manipulate the release date during an app update to get an old app back onto this page. The first 20 apps are show, and you can page through all of them 20 at a time. The app listing can be changed to sort by most popular or by name. Sorting by most popular shows a popularity ranked list for free and paid apps combined. It’s interesting to see which paid apps show up in this list competing with the free apps in that category.

On the left and right side, the top 20 paid and top 20 free apps for this category are shown, and there are links to go to the full top 100 list for each. The top 100 lists show 100 apps, and there is no paging to get to apps 101-200.

Tools to examine Rankings

As a seller of apps, its important to keep an eye on the rankings of your app, your competitors apps, and different apps in order to understand your market. Using iTunes to find apps rankings is laborious, especially because the rankings are different for each country. There are a couple of wonderful tools I use to help. MajicRank will connect to the iTunes servers for you and find the current rankings of any apps you’ve configured in it, and it will do that for every country or just the ‘big 8′ countries. What it doesn’t do is remember your rankings and chart them over time, though the developer is working on this. MajicRank uses the individual category top 100 ranking lists for each country.

Mobclix tracks all apps rankings over time, and over on their website you can get ranking history charts for free. What Mobclix is charting is the free and paid combined popularity that you can see in a category in iTunes USA. So if you use Mobclix and MajicRank together, the rankings won’t match because they show ranking in different lists.