Mobile App Market Research: How to Pick a Niche Before You Build

Between October 1 and 26, 2026, 106,000 new apps launched on the App Store and another 227,000 on Google Play, and only a fraction of their developers did mobile app market research before starting. That works out to almost 13,000 releases a day. Apps that land in categories dominated by big brands, with weak search demand and an audience that doesn't pay, will struggle to find users.

To stay out of that group, we check a niche in six steps. It takes a couple of hours, and at the end it's clear whether the niche is worth entering. ASOMobile analytics makes the market easy to assess, and our example is the Food & Drink niche in the US.

Why research the market before you build

You can fix metadata in a day. You can't fix the wrong niche after release: months of development have already gone into it. There are three easy ways to get the niche wrong.

1. Picking a niche because you need it yourself. If we can't find a good expense tracker, that doesn't mean hundreds of thousands of other people are looking for one, or that the existing options fall short for them.
2. Judging the market by one country. A category that's overheated in the US can be almost empty in Germany or Brazil, and vice versa.
3. Ignoring seasonality. An exam-prep app launched in July will see downloads drop and draw the wrong conclusions about demand.

Market research removes all three risks. Afterwards, we know the size of demand, how saturated the category is, how much people spend in it, and which countries are easier to start in.

Step 1. Assess the whole market in Store Insights

Store Insights gives the big picture of a store: how many apps it has, how many new ones come out, the split between games and apps and between paid and free, and which categories lead in downloads and revenue. You can view the data worldwide or for a single country.

The ASOMobile database holds 7.8M apps from the App Store and 16.5M from Google Play. Release trends in October went in opposite directions: the App Store saw 13.6% fewer new apps than in the same period of September, Google Play 52.8% more. For a newcomer, that's a signal: competition for visibility on Google Play is growing faster right now.

Monetization structure matters even more. In the US App Store, 76.3% of apps are free, so roughly one in four is paid. On Google Play, 90.7% are free, and only one in ten is paid. Paid apps make up a 2.5 times larger share on the App Store, so if you plan to sell for a one-time price, it makes sense to start there. The share of games in the US is similar: 23.3% on the App Store and 28.5% on Google Play. You'll find more market figures in our 2025 mobile app market report.

Further down the same page are the top 10 categories by downloads and by revenue. We compare the two lists: categories that appear only in the first one attract an audience but monetize poorly in-app.

Step 2. Break down the category in Category Intelligence

Category Intelligence shows three category metrics: average monthly revenue, average monthly downloads, and the total number of apps. Next to them, you see where the category ranks among all others by revenue, downloads, and new apps. Below are the top 100 by downloads, the top 100 by revenue, and the category's new apps and games for the current week, the current month, and the previous three months.

Let's take Food & Drink in the US App Store. The category has 41,430 apps and averages 23.6M downloads and $6.2M in revenue per month. That puts it 13th among categories by downloads but only 39th by revenue. Each download brings in about $0.26.

The gap between 13th and 39th place shows how the category works. The brands at the top make money on food orders, not in-app purchases, which is why average category revenue is low. That doesn't mean subscriptions don't work here. The top grossing chart in Step 3 shows who actually earns inside their apps.

The top 100 by downloads confirms it. Over three months, the seven leaders are all national chains and delivery services:

Together, these seven apps collected 17.2M downloads, about a quarter of all downloads in the category. The other three quarters are split among 41,000 apps. That category works for a restaurant chain. For an independent app, fighting the brands for generic keywords makes no sense. You need a sub-niche where the brands don't compete. We looked at the category leaders up close in our review of the best Food & Drinks apps.

The new releases tab also shows saturation. Many releases with low average revenue mean lots of apps are entering the niche, but only a few make money. Few releases with steady revenue usually point to a high barrier to entry: licenses, data, brand trust.

Store Benchmarks shows the category's average conversion at three stages of the store funnel: from impression to product page view, from page view to install, and from impression straight to install.

From October 21 to 27, free Food & Drink apps in the US App Store turned 8.53% of impressions into page views and 6.43% into installs. For comparison, impression-to-install conversion was 2.47% in Business, 1.6% in Finance, and 0.02% in Casino.

Food & Drink's high conversion most likely comes from the brands too: people search for a chain they know by name and install right away. A new app without a recognizable name shouldn't build those numbers into its plan. The benchmark is useful as a ceiling and a reference point: after launch, we compare our own App Store Connect conversion against it.

Step 3. Check how much the top charts move: Top Charts and Category History

Brands at the top don't close off a category on their own. What matters is whether newcomers break through. Top Charts shows the top 20 to 200 apps by country and category in three views: free, paid, and top grossing.

Here's how we check movement: we export the category's top 100 for today and for a date three months back, then count the new names. If only one or two new apps appeared over the quarter, the chart is closed, and entry will be expensive. If there are ten or more, a new product has a shot.

Comparing the views gives one more signal. On October 27, the free Food & Drink chart in the US App Store was led by McDonald's, DoorDash, Taco Bell, and Uber Eats. The top-grossing chart has different leaders, including ReciMe, TapCook, NYT Cooking, NeatEat, and mise: recipe apps and meal planners. No restaurant chain is among them.

This is what a profitable sub-niche looks like inside a category run by brands. Brands take the downloads, while recipe apps and meal planners earn in-app revenue. ReciMe also holds 5th place in the free chart, so a large audience is within reach even without a restaurant chain behind you.

Category History (Rank History) shows the same rankings over time and compares them with competitors on one chart. A sudden jump by an unknown app is worth a closer look: it could be driven by featuring, a viral video, or a new search trend you can catch too. For example, on October 27, Vault 139 climbed 191 positions in the paid Food & Drink chart, and MealieCart climbed 35.

Step 4. Make sure people search for the idea

Category downloads show demand for the leaders. They tell you nothing about our idea. People download McDonald's because they know the brand. A meal planner from nowhere will only be found through search, so search demand needs a separate check.

We list 20–30 queries a user might type to describe our app and run them through Keyword Suggest. The tool is free and shows the store's search suggestions. Then we look at two metrics: Traffic (query popularity) and Complexity (how hard it is to reach the top, from 0 to 10).

Let's check meal planner in the US App Store. It has a Traffic score of 1309, meal planner free has 266, and the variant with personalized recipes has 101. Almost all other suggestions, from meal planner calendar to meal planner and grocery, show zero or near-zero Traffic. Demand is concentrated in three queries, and the fight for them is already on: ReciMe ranks 4th for meal planner.

From here, there are two outcomes.

If most queries have low Traffic, search won't bring much organic traffic. User acquisition will have to rely on ads and external channels.

If there is demand, Complexity decides. When popular queries are close to 10, the leaders have already taken the traffic. But there's often a group of queries nearby with medium Traffic and moderate Complexity. That's where a new app should start.

Search Ads Spy (App Store only) gives an extra signal. It shows which apps buy Apple Search Ads on our queries. For food in the US, the advertisers are DoorDash, Uber Eats, Sonic, 7-Eleven, Popeyes, and Shake Shack, only the top brands.

For meal planner, the list is different: ReciMe, Epicurious, and Supper, alongside MyFitnessPal, Dayly, and RP Diet Coach from Health & Fitness. So meal planner users face competition from more than just Food & Drink apps, and you'll need to look at competitors in neighboring categories too.

For more on collecting queries, see our App Store keyword research guide.

Step 5. Count the money and seasonality: Revenue and Downloads

In Step 2, we got average category figures. Now we need to see how the money is spread across countries and months. We take 10 apps from the top of the sub-niche and run them through Downloads and Revenue.

The % of world metric shows each country's share of an app's downloads and revenue. We look for gaps between the two numbers. In the last week of October, the US gave ReciMe 67.7% of its downloads and 87.3% of its revenue. The UK showed the opposite: 6.8% of downloads and 4.8% of revenue. Each US download brings in more money, so a subscription meal planner should launch in the US first.

One limitation: Revenue estimates income based on the top-grossing chart. If an app isn't there, there's no data. That's a result too: the app either earns little or monetizes outside the store.

For seasonality, we look at the leaders' download chart over a year. Fitness apps grow in January, travel apps before the summer season, shopping apps in November. Launching 4–6 weeks before the peak gives you time to collect your first reviews and rankings. We covered how to plan ASO around seasons in our seasonality guide.

Swings happen within the year too. ReciMe's revenue dropped to $2.9M in September from $4.4M in August, even though downloads grew from 567K to 672K. Before calling it seasonality, we check the same months of the previous year.

Step 6. Choose launch countries: Geo Checker and Featuring

Sometimes a niche is overheated only in the US, while almost no one has claimed it in other countries. Geo Checker shows which countries the leaders' apps are available in and how they localize the title, subtitle, and description.

We look for two kinds of gaps. First: the niche leaders aren't present in a country at all. Second: they're there, but with English metadata. In the second case, an app with local-language metadata can outrank the leader on local queries. We covered how localization expands your keyword reach in a separate article.

ReciMe shows both approaches. In Argentina, the app is called Cocina recetas caseras; in Austria, ReciMe: Rezepte & Essensplaner; in Australia, ReciMe: Recipe Keeper. But in Albania, Armenia, or Bahrain, it runs the English version with the subtitle Cooking, Groceries & Nutrition. In localized countries, the app has hundreds and thousands of ratings, in the rest a handful to a few dozen, though market size plays a role here too. Countries without localization are where a new app can most easily outrank the leader: translating the metadata is enough.

Featuring shows when and in which countries apps were picked for the store's editorial collections. If apps in our niche get featured regularly, we have one more source of free traffic. If the niche never gets featured, don't count on it in the launch plan. We explained how to get into editorial collections in our featuring guide.

Checklist: enter the niche or not

We put the results of all steps into the table below. If it adds up to three or more red flags, we switch the sub-niche or country and go back to development only after a second check.

What's next: from the market to competitors

Market research answers where to launch. Once the niche and countries are chosen, it's time for specific rivals: which keywords they rank for, how they change their metadata, and what users complain about in their reviews. We covered this stage in our article on competitor analysis in the App Store and Google Play.

We repeat the research after launch too, at least once a quarter. Data goes stale fast: in October alone, Google Play releases grew by more than half.

Research the market before you build, and launch where users are waiting.