The App Store Transparency Report provides data on how the App Store operates across all 175 countries and regions where it is available.
The report covers data and information from 2022, as well as Apple’s efforts to keep the App Store a trusted place where users can discover the applications they love. It includes figures such as the number of rejected applications, terminated developer accounts, total application counts and store-related data. According to Apple, the report will be updated annually.
As of 2022, there were a total of 1,783,232 applications available on the App Store. More than six million application submissions, including updates, were reviewed, and 1,679,694 of these submissions were rejected. Let us take a closer look at the reasons behind these rejections.
According to the App Store Review Guidelines, the categories responsible for application submission rejections were as follows:
- Safety: 92,598
- Performance: 1,018,415
- Business: 152,391
- Design: 212,464
- Legal: 441,972
- Other: 79,736
When we examine the figures above, we can see that performance was the leading reason for application rejections. It is possible to say that approximately 60% of rejected updates were related to performance, including application speed and functionality. Performance issues were followed by legal requirements at 26%, design-related reasons at 12%, business-related decisions at 9%, safety issues at 5% and issues in the other category at approximately 4%.
The number of application submissions approved after being rejected and resubmitted was 253,466, while the number of applications removed from the App Store was 186,195.
Although there were more than 36 million registered developer accounts, it can also be stated that 428,000 developer accounts were removed from the App Store. When we examine applications removed from the App Store by category, the figures are as follows:
- Games: 38,883
- Utilities: 20,045
- Business: 16,997
- Education: 16,509
- Lifestyle: 15,171
- Entertainment: 11,757
- Food & Drink: 8,317
- Productivity: 7,314
- Travel: 5,510
- Shopping: 5,376
The report published by Apple also includes information about search behaviour and App Store activity. Let us also examine the data in this area.
First, we can see that the average weekly number of users searching on the App Store exceeded 370 million. Compared with the 650 million weekly visitors received by the App Store, the number of users who perform searches is nearly half of the total visitor count. More than half of users may enter the App Store and leave without making a search. From this perspective, being featured on the App Store homepage or within widgets becomes highly valuable for an application.
The average weekly number of applications appearing among the first 10 results across 100 searches exceeded 190,000. This figure shows how important it is for an application to rank among the top 10 results. When we examine the total number of applications that appeared among the first 10 results rather than the average, the figure exceeds 1.3 million.
To summarize this section, applications appearing among the first 10 positions receive close to 200,000 impressions on average, while they help generate approximately 1.3 million total impressions.
Another important statistic is that weekly redownloads were more than twice as high as first-time downloads. The number of application redownloads was higher than the number of applications downloaded for the first time. The average weekly number of application downloads was 747,873,877, while the average weekly number of application redownloads was 1,539,274,266.
Finally, when we examine the developer-related data, we can see that there were more than 36 million developers within Apple’s ecosystem. Apple stated that it terminated 428,000 developer accounts because of fraud and export control requirements. The relatively low account termination rate is also significant. It can be stated that the account termination rate was approximately 1%.
The report published by Apple contains highly valuable data that can be used both for ASO studies and as a general reference. Hopefully, Apple will continue to disclose store, application and developer-related data transparently every year, allowing us to evaluate app store strategies based on these findings.
You can access the full report and its detailed data through Apple’s App Store Transparency Report using the link below:
https://www.apple.com/legal/more-resources/docs/2022-App-Store-Transparency-Report.pdf
