The new analysis shows that in the past few years, it has become more and more difficult to make an app top the app store in terms of downloads According to the new data of sensor tower, an application information company, since 2019, the number of downloads required for an application to break into the first position in the Apple iPhone app store in the United States has risen by 37%.
Specifically, it estimates that an app now needs about 156000 downloads a day to reach the top of the list, compared with 114000 downloads a day in 2019. But it should be clear that the number of downloads alone does not make an app top of the list. This is just one of several factors that Apple's ranking algorithm takes into account when managing its rankings.
Apple has expanded its ranking algorithm to make it more complex and mysterious. Apptopia, another company, thinks that it has reverse engineered the current version of the algorithm. It is said that it has considered many factors, such as speed, application usage, number of new users, etc.
In other words, the number of downloads is still part of the equation here, and it is also an interesting factor to investigate, because there is little information about the actual operation of Apple's App Store ranking. In the new findings, sensor tower noted that Apple seems to have adjusted the ranking algorithm to cope with the impact of the 2020 covid-19 pandemic.
It reported that in 2020, the number of downloads required for an app to rank first in the U.S. app store reached 185000, a year-on-year increase of 62%, a record high. This will be consistent with the overall increase in app download and use, as consumers stay at home under the government blockade, while schools, stores and workplaces are closed. However, it was relatively easy to reach the same position on Google play at that time, because the required daily downloads only increased by 5% year-on-year, reaching 87000 times in 2020.
Since then, with the stabilization of the post covid trend, the application usage has been normalized, and the number of daily downloads reaching the first has decreased in both markets. This year, sensor tower estimated that, as mentioned above, applications must reach the median daily installation of 156000 times to rank first in the app store. However, Android applications now only need 56000 installations, down 33% from 83000 in 2019.