I scraped 2.7 million apps from the Play Store and this is what I discovered

I’ve been scraping the play store for the last 5 months and have written about 20 or more python scripts and tried multiple techniques to find and scrape all the apps on the play store. This article is the first in the series of analysing the play store and sharing my observations.

1. Ad Supported

Out of 2,723,408 apps I have in my database, a bigger portion of these apps — 55% do not show ads.

2. Genre

The categories in which most apps exist are Education, Business and tools. I shall be digging more into each of these categories.

3. Installs

The number of apps which have more than 5 million downloads comprise a minuscule 0.07% of the play store. On the other end, majority apps don’t even get to the 5000 downloads mark. 72% of the apps on the play store have less than 5000 downloads.

4. Minimum supported Android version

Most developers seem to be keeping Android 5.1 Lollipop as the minimum supported Android version. Unsurprisingly, only 8960 apps target Android 10, 11 and 12 combined. That is only 0.3% of all apps on the play store.

5. Free vs Paid Apps

Only 3.6% of the apps on the play store are paid. Interestingly, only 5.17% of those paid apps offer in app purchases.

Thats all for this time folks. I shall be sharing more insights and stats and dig deeper into each of these categories. Please leave a comment on what stats would you like me to explore. Thanks for reading.