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I need to do a market research on specific type of apps. so is there a way for me to know the download count of the app / any app.

Is there a way to find the number of downloads for a particular app in the iTunes App Store.

Mahdi Alkhatib
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Sathya
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    a crude proxy is to multiply the number of reviews by 100 for free apps and by 20 for paid apps. of course, 100 and 20 are ratios gleaned from app data we have seen on a few apps. this is not an industry standard by an means. if you can determine ratios for other apps in the same category as your target app, the estimate could probably be made more accurate. – Crashalot Nov 22 '12 at 01:47
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    GREAT comment Crashalot - this is very helpful for first quick and dirty market researches – tyrex Jan 16 '14 at 14:42
  • I guess that number varies a lot nowadays, if the app implements in-app reviewing – htafoya May 06 '22 at 15:05
  • I can’t believe I am here and the answer is no… I made a very big mistake getting the iphone this year… the thing that’s honestly painful to me is that I am using a device with A15 bionic yet to simply delete 20 contacts I can’t select them at once and delete… so much mobile processing power but very awful user experience… worst part is I can’t even get to view battery percentage unless I open settings… let’s not even talk about the fact that I can’t access my clipboard history or having to stretch my hand all the way up to get to the previous screen… I miss my droid – linker Sep 14 '22 at 11:14

4 Answers4

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There is no way to know unless the particular company reveals the info. The best you can do is find a few companies that are sharing and then extrapolate based on app ranking (which is available publicly). The best you'll get is a ball park estimate.

John Fricker
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    Although this answer seems likely to be correct, it would be helpful if it included some facts that could be verified. – EJ Mak Nov 13 '17 at 16:06
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Updated answer now that xyo.net has been bought and shut down.

appannie.com and similarweb.com are the best options now. Thanks @rinogo for the original suggestion!

Outdated answer:

Site is still buggy, but this is by far the best that I've found. Not sure if it's accurate, but at least they give you numbers that you can guess off of! They have numbers for Android, iOS (iPhone and iPad) and even Windows!

xyo.net

Elijah Murray
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    Cool site, I checked one of my apps on here and it was about 1,000 downloads too high. The app altogether has 9,000 and the site said 10,000. – SirRupertIII Aug 07 '13 at 19:18
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    Same here, have 1,500 downloads but the site said 2,500. – DominicanCoder Mar 12 '14 at 16:19
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    Was pretty accurate for my Android app, way off the grid for my iOS app (repoerted about 25% of actual downloads). – Vaiden Apr 23 '14 at 20:01
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    Site doesn't seems to be working. It redirects to another site. May be they shut down the service ? – Jijoy Sep 25 '15 at 07:36
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    New site...now it is a business trying to sell something – Kyle Nov 05 '15 at 13:53
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    https://www.appannie.com and http://similarweb.com are decent alternatives now that http://xyo.net seems to be gone. – rinogo Dec 12 '15 at 21:12
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found a paper at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1924044 that suggests a formula to calculate the downloads:

d_iPad=13,516*rank^(-0.903)
d_iPhone=52,958*rank^(-0.944)
krock
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iMe
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    Has anyone been able to verify above with real downloads. I would like to see how accurate this is, considering the algorithm changes all the time. – Dickey Singh Sep 26 '13 at 19:42
  • I'm guessing these constants are a bit out of date, but if you go to that website you can read through their reasoning and calculate new formulas based on current publicly available information. – LunaCodeGirl Apr 22 '16 at 22:15
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    I've tested with my iPhone app and **the result was not accurate**. My app is ranked `1200` and I expected the result to be of about `100` downloads a day, but it gave me `65`. Changing `52958` to `75000`-`80000` give the good result in my case. – AnthoPak Feb 09 '17 at 00:15
  • Please consider that this formula is only for the "paid apps", according to the paper (page.20): "Our approach so far has focused on the demand estimation for the paid apps that are placed on the top 200 bestselling list and overlap with the top grossing app list. Another extension of this work is to estimate the demand for free apps, which attract over 10 times more the volume of downloads..." – Seyed Hamed Shams May 10 '19 at 20:12
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I think developers can do this for their own apps via iTunes Connect but this doesn't help you if you are looking for stats on other peoples apps.

148Apps also have some aggregate AppStore metrics on their web site that could be useful to you but, again, doesn't really give a low-level breakdown of numbers.

You could also scrape some stats from the RSS feeds generated by the iTunes Store RSS Generator but, again, this just gets currently popular apps rather than actual download numbers.

Martin Smith
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  • There was a time when there were apps in the AppStore that gave detailed metrics and graphics for all app sales. In the mean time, most, if not all of them got pulled off the store, on reasons of non-compliance with Apple policy, that forbids such data from being made available. However, I'm interested in the actual sources these apps were accessing, for my own personal interest, not to make this data public through an app. – luvieere Jan 28 '11 at 12:06
  • thanks, 148apps is a really good suggestion. though it dose not give the break down for individual apps it was pretty interesting. – Sathya Jan 31 '11 at 06:10
  • @luvieere, that's simply not true. Many companies discuss their sales figures and revenue openly. Big companies and small. – John Fricker Jan 31 '11 at 16:36
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    @John Fricker I'm not in the habit of making unsupported claims. Take a look at http://www.cocoanetics.com/2009/03/apple-rejects-incredibly-useful-itunes-report-app/ to see what I'm talking about. – luvieere Jan 31 '11 at 21:11
  • As for iTunes Connect there is now an API, see: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1619172/itunes-connect-api – nylund Sep 18 '12 at 10:18