AppShopper

This particular data set was requested by Imangi Studios to try to answer the question if application size affects a developer’s chances in reaching the Top 100 lists in the App Store.

I should warn you, however, that this data can’t actually answer that question, since correlation does not necessarily equal causation.

The reason the 10MB cutoff is so important to developers it that Apple restricts over the air (EDGE, 3G) downloads to applications <10MB in size. Otherwise, you need to find a Wi-Fi hotspot or download the app on your computer. Developers are quite aware of this and make special efforts to reduce the size of their applications to < 10MB if possible. The thinking is that you want to capture as many impulse purchases as possible from iPhone owners on the go.

So here's the data.

App Size in the Top 100 Paid Apps Over the Past 30 days

Meanwhile, the percentage of all paid applications in the App Store that are <10MB is actually 86.2%. So there seems to be a negative correlation between app size and Top 100 ranking. Here's the data for top 10:

App Size in the Top 10 Paid Apps Over the Past 30 days

Note that while it looks like the trend is increasing, a look at the data over 90 days shows it’s cyclical.

With only 10 apps at a given time, this graph is going to be more affected by the flavor of the week in terms of iPhone apps, so take with a grain of salt.

So despite 86% of apps being less than 10MB, only ~60-70% of them make it into the top 100. Now this doesn’t necessarily mean anything by itself, as very low quality apps may also be very small apps. What I do think it means is that > 10MB is certainly not a death sentence for an app.

At the end of last week we saw a massive number of App approvals on the iTunes App Store. This resulted in a over 1300 apps (of which over 300 were games) appearing in one day alone. We had heard Apple had had quite a back log of approvals, so hopefully, they have cleared the queue for now.

Number of Apps approved by day:

Number of Games approved by day:

Introducing the new Top 200 App listings!  These lists replace the former Top 100 and may now be filtered by category and top paid / top free / top grossing Apps.