81%
of the cooking apps we found — 579 of 715 — never appear in the store's own results for the obvious query.
An independent, open index of mobile apps
We measured one category of one app store completely — recipe apps in Germany. The finding is not that the store ranks badly. It is that most of what exists never appears at all.
The same category, counted two ways.
941 is a lower bound: one step along the store's own „you might also like“
links, and every further step finds more. Apps whose listing is about medical prescriptions
rather than cooking are excluded — in German, Rezept means both. Corrected
31 Aug 2026: ten entries that passed the keyword test but are press products or a kids
game (nine cooking-magazine ePapers, one franchise title) were removed; all figures on
this page are on the corrected basis. Method & corrections.
Source: iTunes Search API + App Store product pages, German storefront, read 19–21 Aug 2026.
The finding
of the cooking apps we found — 579 of 715 — never appear in the store's own results for the obvious query.
is the coverage of the single best search query, measured against what 25 different queries find together.
of cooking apps listed as „free“ charge money once opened — 697 of 907. The median app's highest in-app price is €39.99.
is the largest single in-app purchase we found behind the word „free“, in one AI recipe generator. Twenty-six apps sit above €100.
Two of these figures count different things, deliberately. The 81% is measured against the 715 apps a search sweep found, because an app discovered by following the store's own links was never in a search result to begin with — counting it would be circular. The price figures use all 941 apps we know of, because a price is a price however we found the app.
We measured Germany because you cannot measure what you cannot see completely, and one country in one language is small enough to see completely. The mechanism is not German. It is how the store is built, in every market it operates.
The mechanism
No conspiracy — ordinary engineering. Search eligibility on iOS comes from an app's name (30 characters), its subtitle (30), and a hidden keyword field (100). A few smaller surfaces are indexed too — in-app purchase names, in-app event titles, and since 2025 the text inside screenshots. What an app actually does is written in its description, and the description is not indexed at all. If the word is not in those fields, the app is not eligible for that search.
Says „Rezept“ sixteen times in its own description. The word appears in neither its name nor its subtitle.
Its subtitle is „Rezepte für Monsieur Cuisine“. The word is in the indexed field — and that still is not enough.
Sits at position 8. Nothing about the app explains that placement — its name is simply, exactly, the search query.
Twelve ratings at position eight. Five thousand ratings nowhere at all. That is what eligibility measures — not quality, not upkeep, not price. These are single measurements taken on 19 August 2026; store results change, and ours are timestamped so you can check them against today's.
Who pays for this
If the search is three results deep and the best of the three is auctioned, being found is no longer earned. It is bought — and the bill travels.
907 cooking apps listed as „free“ in the German App Store, by the highest single in-app purchase Apple publishes on each product page.
| Highest in-app purchase | Apps | Share |
|---|---|---|
| No in-app purchase | 210 | 23.2% |
| Up to €10 | 128 | 14.1% |
| €10–30 | 148 | 16.3% |
| €30–60 | 291 | 32.1% |
| €60–100 | 104 | 11.5% |
| Over €100 | 26 | 2.9% |
Median highest price €39.99 · largest found €599.99 · Source: App Store product pages, read 20 Aug 2026. Prices are as Apple publishes them. Billing periods are not published reliably, so nothing here is annualised — a €599.99 purchase is a single listed price, not a yearly cost.
Total advertising revenue across all products, 2025, in billions of US dollars — app-install advertising is one part of it, not the whole. Shown for scale, not as app-marketing revenue.
Apple sells the top position in its own search results and also takes commission
on sales made through the store — two revenue streams from the same transaction.
Sources: company financial reporting; TikTok and Apple advertising revenue are third-party
estimates (eMarketer), not reported figures. Figures we did not measure ourselves are marked
as estimates throughout.
Two signals decide: a star average and a price word. Search is three results deep in practice, and the top slot is sold — Apple markets it to advertisers with „conversion rates over 60%“.
An estimated $78 billion went into user acquisition in 2025 and $109 billion into app marketing overall (AppsFlyer). For scale, consumers spent roughly $166 billion across both app stores that year. Set side by side: for every $2 a person spends inside the stores, something close to $1 is spent by somebody trying to be found. The two figures are differently scoped, so read it as an order of magnitude, not a ratio.
Industry estimates put roughly two thirds of all mobile advertising spend with Google, Meta and TikTok. None of that spending makes a single app better.
There are two ways: a higher price, or more advertising inside the app. In-app advertising was worth an estimated $151 billion in 2025 — the second invoice, paid in attention. Then the store takes its published 15–30% commission on the subscription that the advertising produced.
The developer, who spends a year building and learns the year was the cheap part. And the user, once in money and once in attention, for an app that had to get worse in order to afford being found. This is not a market failure. The market is working exactly as it was built.
What we build
The important word is index, not ranking. We do not re-sort the store's answer — we build the candidate set ourselves, then order it by how well an app is cared for and what it truly costs.
Maintenance and honesty decide the order. Never downloads, never advertising budget.
An app that never enters the list cannot be ranked fairly. Finding what exists is the harder half of the job, and the half nobody does.
We publish dated facts with their source. We do not score apps and we do not call anyone a fraud.
We take no money from any app, ever. There is no placement to buy — for anyone, at any price.
Open source, open data, open method — including the parts that did not work. A public good has to be inspectable to be trusted.
Method
That is the condition, not a promise. Anyone claiming a market is opaque has to be checkable themselves.
The public iTunes Search API and App Store product pages. No paid tooling, no access anybody else lacks.
Every figure carries the date it was read. Where a value is missing, it says so — nothing is estimated to fill a gap.
We publish neither user reviews nor scores of our own. Facts with sources. You draw the conclusion.
The scripts are open. Anyone who thinks we are wrong can run them and say so.
Our first count of this category was wrong: it swept in pharmacy apps, because Rezept is German for both recipe and prescription. We found it, fixed it, and the figures here are the corrected ones. Errors get published, dated.
If you build an app named here and something is inaccurate, write to korrektur@openappindex.org. We check every notice and correct with a dated note.