I scraped the US top charts (840 apps). Some numbers on age and monetization
I've been going back and forth on whether to build an Android app as a side project, and instead of reading more opinion pieces I scraped the top charts of the App Store and Google Play (US, main categories, 840 apps total, 426 Play and 414 App Store) and looked at what's actually in there.
Age. Google Play doesn't show release dates but the App Store does, so for that half: the median app is 9.6 years old. 47% are older than 10 years. 13% are under 2 years. The charts are basically a list of things that have been around since 2016 or earlier. I sort of knew this, but seeing 47% over ten years was still a bit deflating.
Price. All 840 are free to download. Not most, all. I looked for paid apps in Productivity and Education specifically because that's where they used to be. Zero.
Monetization, Google Play half only (the App Store doesn't expose the flags): 62% have in-app purchases, 38% show ads. By category it's quite different:
| Category | ads | IAP |
|---|---|---|
| Entertainment | 46% | 51% |
| Productivity | 27% | 23% |
| Health & Fitness | 17% | 39% |
| Finance | 10% | 25% |
| Education | 9% | 27% |
So ads are only really common in Entertainment. Health & Fitness is subscriptions. Finance apps mostly make money outside the app, which makes sense (banks, brokers, the app is a front end).
Publishers. 647 different ones for 840 apps. The top 10 (Microsoft and Google with 18 each, then Disney with 7) have under 10% of the slots between them. I expected a lot more concentration than that.
Updates. 90% were updated in the last 30 days, 96% in the last 90. Median rating 4.65.
What I take from it for my own project: don't plan on the charts, plan on a niche with search traffic. Free download with a one-time unlock or a subscription depending on the category. Monthly updates are the baseline, not a nice to have. And ad-supported is only a normal model in Entertainment, everywhere else you'd be the odd one out.
Usual caveats: one snapshot, US only, top charts only (so survivorship bias by construction), and the ads/IAP flags are Play only.
The scraper is on Apify (https://apify.com/pulsedata/app-store-google-play-scraper) if you want to run it for another country or category, it does both stores in one run. The dataset with all fields (rating histogram, installs, IAP price ranges, update dates and so on) is $9 on Gumroad: https://pulsdata.gumroad.com/l/app-market-us-2026/LAUNCH