What people are building

The app types developers actually set out to build, and how crowded each one already is.

156 types, counted across every app we track · counted Oct 12, 19:41

Money

Apps that track where money goes. The most crowded family on the store and the easiest to start: the data model is small, but users expect bank syncing and years of history before they will switch.

Health & fitness

Logging the body — food, movement, sleep, cycles. Retention lives or dies on how little typing a daily entry takes, and anything medical draws extra App Store review scrutiny.

Productivity

Getting things done and remembering them. Enormously crowded, and the apps that survive win on speed of capture and sync rather than on features.

Utilities

Small tools that do one job on demand — convert, scan, measure, clean. Cheap to build and easy to rank for, but users arrive through search and rarely come back on their own.

Photo & video

Editing and making things out of pictures and video. Heavy on-device processing, and the category where a single good effect can carry an app.

Lifestyle & home

The household and the everyday — meals, pets, plants, journals, cars. Smaller audiences per niche, with much less competition than money or productivity.

Learning

Practice and revision. Content is the real cost here, not code, and it is the category where a subscription is easiest to justify.

Small business

Tools for running a small operation — booking, invoicing, stock, hours. Fewer downloads than consumer apps, and by far the highest willingness to pay.

Travel & outdoors

Getting there and being outdoors. Usage is seasonal and bursty, and offline behaviour matters more here than anywhere else.

AI-native

Apps built around a model rather than a database — chat, generation, transcription. The newest family, the fastest growing, and the one where running costs scale with use rather than with downloads.

Games

Casual formats people already understand: puzzles, words, cards, idle loops. Discovery is brutal, but the mechanics are well-trodden and cheap to prototype.

Music & audio

Listening, recording and making sound. Background audio and lock-screen controls are the hard part, and licensing is the reason most of these stay tools rather than catalogues.

Shopping & deals

Spending better — prices, coupons, parcels, rewards. Usually depends on data someone else owns, so the durable ones either scrape carefully or partner.

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How these counts are worked out

Each type matches app names, sellers and categories across every app we track — the same match the apps search uses, so a count always agrees with the list it opens. A high number means a crowded niche, not a bad one.

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