How to find a profitable iOS niche
8 min read · updated
Most niche-finding advice is a brainstorming exercise, which is why it produces ideas that feel good and sell nothing. The App Store publishes enough for free to do this the other way round: start from what is measurable, and let the list shrink.
Everything below comes from Apple's own public endpoints, so you can reproduce every number without a paid tool. It is the same data behind our published Scout run, which is where the figures on this page come from.
1. Demand: count new ratings, not downloads
Apple publishes no download counts, to anyone. What it does publish is each app's lifetime rating count, and if you record that daily the difference is a real demand signal: new ratings a month. It is a proxy, but it is a measured one, and it moves with usage.
A category with a handful of new ratings a month across its whole top 100 is not underserved, it is empty. That distinction kills more candidate niches than anything else on this page, and it takes one look.
One warning that costs people real money: rating propensity differs by storefront. Turkish users rate roughly twice as readily as American ones, and Japanese users at less than half the American rate. Comparing raw rating counts across US, UK, Turkey, Germany, Japan, South Korea and China makes Turkey look like the best market on earth and Japan like a dead one. Both readings are artefacts.
2. The wall: what it costs to get on the chart at all
The number that decides whether one person can enter a category is the median lifetime rating count of its top-grossing apps. Call it the entry wall. It is the rough distance between a new app and the money.
| US category | Modelled installs / mo | Charted competitors | Entry wall |
|---|---|---|---|
| Productivity | ~113.7M | 154 | ~874,000 ratings |
| Photo & Video | ~71.1M | 144 | ~1,193,900 ratings |
| Health & Fitness | ~27.2M | 148 | ~814,300 ratings |
Read that table the way it is meant to be read: Photo & Video is the second biggest of the three and by far the hardest, because its wall is 46% higher than Health & Fitness' on a third fewer competitors. Size and difficulty are different axes, and the one that matters to a solo developer is the second.
The same wall in a smaller storefront is a fraction of the height. UK Business in one weekly run carried an entry wall around 37,900 ratings against the US figure of about 374,300. That is the same category, the same week, and a tenth of the climb.
3. Money proof: does anything small get paid here?
The cheapest test in this whole guide. Look at the top ten grossing apps in the category and count how many hold under 5,000 ratings. If the answer is zero, every dollar in that category is going to apps with enormous installed bases, and a good small app will not change that.
In the run this guide quotes, US Business returned 0 of the top ten grossing under 5,000 ratings, while UK Business returned 2 and Turkish Business returned 3. Those two are markets where a small app demonstrably monetises. That is not a soft signal, it is an existence proof.
4. Only now, look for the specific opening
Once a category survives the first three tests, the actual idea comes from the incumbents' recent one and two star reviews, which is a separate job covered in validating an app idea with reviews. The order matters. Reading reviews first produces a great idea inside a category you cannot enter, and you will not find that out until you have built it.
What this method will not tell you
- Revenue. Nobody outside Apple has real revenue. Anything you are shown is modelled, ours included, and the modelling is worth understanding before you trust a number that came out of it.
- Android. Different store, different data, different economics.
- Whether you should build it. A niche can pass every test here and still be a bad fit for the person reading. That part is yours.
Questions
- What actually makes an App Store niche profitable for one developer?
- Three things at once, and two of them are usually missing. There has to be real demand, measured as new ratings a month rather than as a category being famous. The ratings wall has to be low enough that a new app can reach the chart at all. And somebody in that category has to already be paying, which you can see by whether any small app is in the top ten grossing. A category with demand and a million-rating wall is not a niche, it is a spectator sport.
- Is a big category better than a small one?
- No, and it is usually worse. Productivity in the US moved roughly 113.7M modelled installs a month in the run this guide quotes, with 154 charted competitors and a median top-grossing app holding about 874,000 ratings. That wall is the whole story: the size of the market is not the thing you have to beat, the incumbents are.
- How long does this take?
- An afternoon, if you do it in the order below and stop early. Most candidate niches die at step two, and finding that out in five minutes is the point.