How to find out how many downloads an app has

You found a competitor and want to know how big it is. The honest answer is that only its developer knows the exact number. But the stores publish enough to get a useful picture, and the two stores publish very different things.

Google Play: a public counter, in steps

Every Google Play app page shows a line such as “100K+ downloads”. That is Google’s own figure. Three things to know about it:

• It moves in steps. 1K+, 5K+, 10K+, 50K+, 100K+, 500K+, 1M+ and so on. “100K+” means at least 100,000 and fewer than 500,000.
• It is the lowest number of the step. An app at 480,000 still shows 100K+.
• It counts since launch. It tells you the total, not how the app is doing this month.

App Store: no download number at all

Apple does not show downloads on an app’s page, and has no public counter. What it does show:

• The number of ratings, per country. More ratings mean more users, but the share of users who rate varies a lot between kinds of app.
• Chart positions. An app in the top 100 of a big country is being downloaded thousands of times a day; an app outside every chart is not.
• The release date and version history, which tell you how long it took to get there.

How download estimates are made

Since Apple gives no number, every figure you see for an App Store app is an estimate, in every tool. The usual ingredients are the same everywhere:

• Ratings. On Google Play, both installs and ratings are public, so you can measure how many installs stand behind one rating for each kind of app. Apply that to an App Store app’s ratings and you get a range.
• Chart rank. Apps whose real daily installs are known show how many downloads a given rank needs.
• Growth between days. How fast ratings or the Play counter move from one day to the next.

What about revenue?

Revenue is rougher still. For a paid app it is the price times the downloads. For a free app with purchases it depends on what share of users pay and how much, which nobody outside the company can see. Money from ads and from sales outside the store cannot be seen at all.

How IndieTower shows it

On an app’s page, IndieTower shows the stores’ own figures as they are, and its own estimate in a separate card tagged IndieTower estimate with a confidence level. For Google Play the total is Google’s counter and nothing else. For the App Store it is built from the app’s ratings and what we measure on Google Play apps of the same category. Estimates are part of the Indie plan. What every number means.

To see which new apps are already large, without looking them up one by one, open Breakouts: new apps that passed 10,000, 100,000 or a million downloads.