The headline finding

Old money vs. the AI wave.

THE INCUMBENTS

The charts are owned by 17-year-olds

Amazon Shopping, Chase, Target and Citi have held chart positions since the App Store opened — 17.7 years old and still ranking, with ratings above 4.8. The median chart app is 8 years old and ships an update every 6 days. That's the bar.

THE BREAKOUTS

…but AI apps are breaking in fast

The youngest apps on the charts are almost all AI: Grok (1.4 y, 3.7M ratings), Suno (1.7 y), Gemini (1.8 y). The report isolates every chart app under 2 years old so you can see exactly which wedges still open the door.

A taste of the data

Category benchmarks — the bar you'd have to clear.

Real rows from the report. IAP share = % of chart apps in the category monetizing with in-app purchases.
Category	Chart apps	Median rating	Median age	IAP share	Ratings leaders
Finance	182	4.70	7.7 y	54%	Wells Fargo, Credit Karma, Bank of America
Health & Fitness	148	4.67	7.1 y	73%	Flo, Home Workout, Sweatcoin
Education	83	4.54	7.9 y	52%	Gauth, Babbel
Productivity	74	4.52	7.5 y	31%	Gemini, Outlook, Excel

Plus publisher concentration: Google alone holds 29 chart slots, Microsoft 18, TikTok and Disney 7 each — the report shows the full top 15 so you know which categories are winnable and which are walled gardens.

What you get

A report to read, a dataset to work with.

01 · PDF

The report

Publisher concentration — who actually owns the chart slots
Category benchmarks: rating, age, monetization
The oldest incumbents still charting
Every breakout app under 2 years old
Free-chart vs top-grossing structure

02 · CSV

app-market-dataset.csv — all 840 apps

Developer, contact email & website (where Google Play publishes them)
Rating + ratings count, install bands
Price, in-app purchases, ads flags, content rating
Release date, app age, days since last update, version
Store URL and every chart membership

Who it's for

Built for people who ship apps — or sell to those who do.

Indie devs & app founders — pick categories where incumbents are old and the rating bar is beatable.
ASO & mobile marketers — benchmark ratings, monetization and update cadence against the leaders.
Investors & analysts — publisher concentration and category structure at a glance.
B2B sellers — 840 app publishers with contact details straight from store listings.

How it's built

Public data, reproducible method.

Every row comes from publicly visible US store listings, collected in August 2026 — no estimates, no modelled numbers. Every app links back to its live store page.

Generated with the PulseData App Store & Google Play Scraper — rerun it on any country, category, keyword or competitor watchlist yourself.

Also from PulseData: State of Google Advertising — DTC & Ecommerce 2026.

Questions

FAQ

What exactly do I download?

A ZIP with the PDF report, app-market-dataset.csv (840 rows, 26 columns) and a readme documenting every column.

Which charts are covered?

US top-free and top-grossing charts on both stores — overall, plus Health & Fitness, Finance, Productivity and Education deep-dives. Chart membership for each app is in the dataset.

Does it include downloads and revenue numbers?

It includes everything the stores publish: install bands on Google Play (e.g. "100M+"), ratings volume on both stores, and price/IAP/ads monetization flags. Stores don't disclose revenue; chart position on the top-grossing chart is the public revenue signal, and it's captured per app.

How fresh is it — can I get other countries or categories?

Snapshot: August 2026, US storefronts. The exact pipeline is public — run our Apify actor on any country or category and rebuild the dataset any time for a few dollars.

Can I use it in client work?

Yes — internal analysis, decks and client deliverables are all fine. Just don't resell the files themselves as-is.

Instant download

The chart leaders leave footprints. Read them.

One avoided mistake — a category you now know is a walled garden, or a wedge you now know is open — pays for this many times over.

Get the report + dataset €15