If you ship an indie app, most of the attention will go to someone else. That is not pessimism, it is what the numbers look like when you count real visits instead of downloads.
Everything below comes from one public source, the Indie App Landscape report on Censuus, as it stood on 2026-09-24. It covers the 262 independent apps tracked there, which together recorded 1,884 visits and 863 store taps at the time. The report recomputes live, so read the figures as a dated snapshot.
The head: ten apps, 43% of the visits
On that snapshot, the ten busiest apps took 43% of all recorded visit traffic. Every other tracked app shared what was left.
That is a steep curve, but it is not a winner-takes-all market either. More than half of the attention still lands outside the top ten. The long tail is long, and it is where most indie apps live.
What the tail tells a maker
The practical reading is less about the head and more about where you sit:
- Being in the tail is the default. With 262 apps and ten taking almost half the visits, most apps get a small, steady share. That is a baseline to build from, not a failure.
- Visits are not the finish line. The board also counts store taps, when a visitor goes on to the App Store or Google Play. Across the catalogue there were 863 taps against 1,884 visits on that snapshot. Your own ratio of taps to visits says more about whether your page and positioning land than raw visits do.
- Category decides a lot. The same report shows that some categories draw far more visits per app than others. Productivity has 31 tracked apps and 89 visits, while Food & Drink has 13 apps and 331 visits. Where you build changes which part of the curve you start on.
Where indie apps ship
The platform split on the snapshot is worth a look too:
- 235 of the 262 apps are on iOS.
- 163 are iOS only.
- 72 ship on both iOS and Android.
- 99 are on Google Play in total.
So most tracked makers start on iOS, and a minority go cross-platform from day one. If you are Android first, you are in a much smaller crowd.
Quality is not what separates the head from the tail
The report also averages the store rating across the rated apps it tracks, and indie quality runs high overall. In other words, the tail is not full of bad apps. The difference between the head and the tail is mostly attention, which is a distribution problem more than a product problem.
How the ranking works, briefly
Apps on Censuus are ranked by their real first-party visit traffic. Sponsors can add points on top of that traffic to lift their position, and sponsored rows are labelled. The numbers in this post are raw visit and tap counts from the report, not ranks.
Takeaway
The long tail is not a place to escape from so much as a place to understand. Pick a category where attention outweighs the number of competitors, watch your tap-through rather than just your visits, and treat the top ten as a moving target rather than a fixed club.
The live figures, category by category, are in the Indie App Landscape report.
