Insights from Google Play Store Apps
Google play store, the most popular Android app store hosts around 2.6 million apps and in this article, I’m going to do some analysis on the google play data set available on Kaggle of around 10K apps, to help me answer the questions below:
How apps are distributed among categories? What are the most popular categories in the play store? How this changed over past few years? What are the top installed vs. Rated Freemium/Premium apps? What’s the average Premium App price?
How apps are distributed among categories?
Here you can see in descending order the number of apps per category.
The top 3 categories are Family, Game and Tools respectively and apps in these categories accounts for around 38% of the apps in our data-set.
The number of apps per category is not necessarily an indicator of the most downloaded apps. In the next section, we will look into the popular categories based on the number of installations.
What are the most popular categories in the play store? How this changed over past few years?
Here we are concerned with the number of installation of apps per category, and as we can see from the below graph, the top 5 categories are Game, Communication, Productivity, Social, Tools and Family.
These were the top 5 categories throughout the play store lifetime, but what are the popular categories in 2018, 2017, and 2016 and which categories have moved up the list and which have moved down?
In year 2018, the top categories were:
1- Communication
2-Game
3- Family
4-Tools
5-Productivity
Whereas in year 2017, these were:
1-Game
2-Family
3-Tools
4-Photography
5-Sports
and finally in 2016:
1-Game
2-Tools
3-Family
4-Video_Players
5-Productivity
Communication and Social are moving up the list while Photography, Sports and Video_Players are moving down the list.
Family, Game and Tools were among the top 5 in every year.
What are the top installed vs. Rated Freemium apps?
The majority of apps (~92%)in the data-set are free apps, however it is worth noting that many of these app have in-app purchasing.
The top downloaded and rated free apps are listed in the below tables receptively.
What are the top installed vs. Rated Premium apps?
Minecraft and Hitman are the top downloaded paid apps with 10 millions downloads.
Medical, Tools, Personalization, Family and Books_And_Reference categories are the among the top rated paid apps.
Finally, a more interesting question is to dig up the top ranked apps having 100K downloads or more. These are listed in the table below:
What’s the average Premium App price?
As per the below plot,the majority of apps cost less than $10.
Conclusion
In this article, we used the Kaggle play store data-set to take a look at the most popular categories throughout the past few years.
We found out there is demand increase on Communication and Social categories while demand is decreasing for Photography, Sports and Video Players categories.
We also examined the top installed/rated premium and freemium apps and finally, we digged out that the majority of apps cost less than $10.
To find more about this analysis, see the link to my GitHub available here.
What category do you think will be the new growing trend in the near future?
