How to Find Your App's Real Competitors

Your competitors are the apps people weigh against yours

A competitor is not an app that looks like yours. It is an app a person considers for the same job: the other option in front of them when they decide what to install. A sleep tracker’s rival can be an alarm app with a sleep mode. A budgeting app can lose a user to a simple spending log. Looks and genre are poor guides.

Apple’s categories are broad. Apple says the primary category matters for discoverability and decides which tab of the store your app appears in, but one category such as Productivity can hold note apps, timers and document scanners that never fight over the same person. So the category you picked is where to start looking, not the answer.

Every app has competitors and a category, yours included. That is not a problem to fix. It is the context people use to choose, and what sets an app apart is the thing it does that its rivals do not: a feature they lack, a plainer price, a closer fit for one kind of user. You can only name those differences once you know who you are compared with.

Many apps do more than one job, so they have more than one set of rivals

A use case is the job a person wants done, such as tracking habits or breaking a bad one. AppTierList sorts iPhone apps by use case rather than by Apple’s genre, and its lists show how often one app answers several jobs. Counting only apps that hold a tier, 41.3% of the 18,934 ranked apps hold one in two or more lists, and 13.3% in three or more.

That means “who are my competitors” often has more than one honest answer. A journaling app can sit in a mood list and a gratitude list, with different rivals in each.

The lists also differ in how crowded they are. About a quarter of the 1,235 active lists rank 11 apps or fewer, while 30.3% are full, with all 40 ranked places taken. A small list gives you a handful of direct rivals to study one by one. A full one means you have to narrow down. For the same count over every app in a list, ranked or not, see the app directories guide.

The rivals you meet more than once are the real ones

The longest list of rivals is not the most useful one. An app that holds a tier in two or more lists has a median of 56 different rivals across them, but a median of only 13 meet it in more than one list. Across every pair of apps that share a list, just 14.8% share a second one. Still, 92.5% of those multi-list apps have at least one such repeat rival.

Take Streaks, a habit app. It is ranked in habit tracking and in breaking bad habits. Across the two lists, 49 other apps are ranked beside it, and 6 of them appear in both, among them Way of Life and HabitBull. Whichever job a person starts from, those six are in the comparison.

Use the same test on your own app. Any app that turns up in two or more of the places below goes on your short list. Everything else is background noise you can check now and then.

Four places to look, all free and done in about an hour

You need no paid tool for this. Open a note on your phone and write down every app name each step turns up.

1. App Store search for your use phrase. Type the words a user would type for the job, not your app’s name, for instance “habit tracker” or “quit smoking counter”. Apple says search results rest on a number of factors, including text relevance (title, subtitle, keywords and primary category) and user behaviour such as downloads, ratings and reviews, so the first results show who owns that search today. Try two or three phrasings and note the top results each time.
2. You Might Also Like on your own page. Open your app’s page in the App Store and scroll to the You Might Also Like row. Do the same on the pages of the first rivals you found. These are the apps the store itself places near yours.
3. The use-case lists you belong in. Find your use case on AppTierList, such as habit tracking, read the apps ranked there, then check the neighbouring lists your app could fit. Each list’s record in the public API, for instance /api/v1/lists/habit-tracking, states what the list covers and what it leaves out, so you can see which job you truly share with a rival.
4. The apps people name in reviews. Read your recent reviews and those of your closest rivals. Lines such as “switched from” or “better than” name a competitor in the user’s own words, and they often name one you missed.

Then count. An app named in two or more of these four places is a real competitor. Keep that list short enough to remember.

Show up where your rivals show up, and let your differences do the work

Once you have the short list, the aim is to be seen in the same places. In what we see, the biggest visibility in this market comes from being listed and named beside your competitors: in the same search results, the same use-case lists and the same comparisons that people and AI assistants read (the GEO guide covers the assistant side). Whether you sit just above or just below a rival matters less than being in the same list, and much less than having something they lack.

AppTierList computes that order, which rests mostly on public App Store data; the How we rank page lists every part. Adding your app puts it in the comparison people already make.

Differences are not only features. Price model is one: in 16.2% of the active lists where both price models are known, the first and second apps use different price models (paid upfront, free with in-app purchases, or free with none). Two apps that do the same job can still be the right pick for different people.

One limit keeps this honest: never borrow a rival’s name. Apple’s App Review Guidelines say not to pack metadata with popular app names and that a subtitle should not reference other apps, and Apple’s search page lists competing app names among the terms to keep out of keywords. Describe your job in your own words; the App Store optimization guide shows how to pick that phrase.

For visibility on the App Store itself, ratings are among the signals Apple names behind search (see the ratings guide); in what we see, regular updates help too.

Claim your page, then make your differences visible

1. Claim the app’s page with your email; it is free, with no password to remember.
2. Fill in your website and your own words, written around the differences your search turned up. Readers see those words when the app becomes Verified.
3. Share your page in the places you already talk about the app.