Featured Apps: The Influence of Star Rating, Price, Age & Category

I had a request for a blog post recently on Twitter that I thought was interesting.

@stuartkhall @AppbotX Would love to see a report on % of new apps vs updates as “main” features in the App Store — Quentin Zervaas (@HendX) May 29, 2015

I know personally when I have app store features they haven’t been straight away, so on Wednesday June 3, 2015 I took a snapshot of the app store features for iPhone on the homepage of the US store and ran the numbers.

There were 129 apps featured on the front page, here’s what I found.

Rating

Unsurprisingly the rating / how users feel about the app was extremely important.

Over 50% of apps featured were 4.5 or 5 star apps.

Making an app people love is the most important thing to concentrate on.

Price

As with most apps on the App Store the majority of apps featured were free to download.

Surprisingly of the apps that did charge, $2.99 and $4.99 were the most represented prices of those featured.

Don’t be afraid to charge a fair price for a quality app if you decide to not go freemium.

Category

As expected games dominated the apps featured, with 60%. This isn’t surprising when games are given their own sections like ‘Best New Games’.

Interestingly, for this particular week, the breakdown varied a lot from what appears in the top charts with Lifestyle and Education featuring heavily.

Age

Finally coming back to the original question around the % of new apps vs updates.

Looking over all the featured apps the age in days varied from 6 day to 2382 days, with a median of 482 days or 1.3 years old.

27 of the 129 apps (20.9%) were launched less than a month ago, leaving the vast majority of the features to older apps that have been updated recently.

This is great news for us developers that miss out on a feature when our apps launch.

Conclusion

It’s critical we make great apps that people love and leave us 5 star reviews.

Even if you don’t get those big app store features when you first launch, stick at it, you are still in with a shot.