Originally published on Extenify.
Your App Store download count is easy to find once you know where Apple hides it, but a competitor's is never shown anywhere. This post covers both cases: which exact figures App Store Connect gives you for your own app, and how to build an honest estimate for any other app from public data.
Apple shows ratings, not downloads
Unlike Google Play, which prints a range such as "1M+" on every listing, an App Store product page has no download figure at all, and Apple offers no public endpoint for one. What you do get on every listing:
- A rating count, which is stored per storefront (country)
- A chart badge showing the app's position in its category's Top Free chart
- A version history, which tells you how actively the app is maintained
Every third-party download estimate for an iPhone app, paid tools included, is built on signals like these.
Your own app: pick the right metric
If you have analytics access in App Store Connect, the exact numbers live under Analytics. Apple rebuilt that section in March 2026, so older tutorial screenshots will not match, but the metric definitions stayed the same:
| Metric | What it counts | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| First-Time Downloads | First download of the app on a device | Growth, launches, "new users" |
| Redownloads | Returning users downloading again (no auto-updates or restores) | Re-engagement |
| Total Downloads | First-Time Downloads + Redownloads | Conversion rate (Apple's formula uses it) |
| Installations | Completed installs per device, Family Sharing included | Device reach, not people |
| Updates | App updates, auto-updates included | Never a growth number |
Two details save a lot of confusion. Download metrics only appear once an app has at least five first-time downloads or pre-orders. And usage metrics such as sessions only cover users who opted in to share analytics, so they will always look smaller than downloads.
When someone quotes "downloads" with no qualifier, ask which one they mean. For an app that has been live for a few years, First-Time and Total can differ by a factor of two.
Pull the numbers with the Analytics Reports API
For a daily dashboard, skip the web UI and request the App Store Downloads report from the Analytics Reports API. Per Apple's documentation it includes:
- Date, app version, device, platform version, territory and counts
- A download type that separates first-time downloads, redownloads, manual updates, auto-updates and restores
- A source type: App Store search, browse, app referrer, web referrer, App Clip or institutional purchase
Daily reports arrive every day, weekly ones on Fridays and monthly ones on the fifth of the following month. Data is complete within two days, and history goes back to January 1, 2024 on request. The practical consequence: never treat yesterday's row as final. Store each day and overwrite it when a later report brings corrections.
Estimating someone else's downloads
No API returns a competitor's downloads, so any exact-looking figure you see is a model. You can build a transparent one from two free signals.
Signal 1: rating counts in every storefront. The iTunes lookup endpoint returns userRatingCount for one country per request, so loop over the markets you care about:
// Node 18+, no dependencies
const countries = ['us', 'gb', 'de', 'fr', 'jp', 'br', 'in'];
async function ratingsByCountry(appId) {
const out = {};
for (const cc of countries) {
const res = await fetch(`https://itunes.apple.com/lookup?id=${appId}&country=${cc}`);
const { results = [] } = await res.json();
if (results[0]) out[cc] = results[0].userRatingCount ?? 0;
await new Promise((r) => setTimeout(r, 500)); // be gentle with the rate limit
}
return out;
}
When Extenify ran this kind of check for Slack across those seven storefronts on October 31, 2026, the US held 54,738 of 87,621 ratings, so more than a third sat outside the US. A US-only check would have missed it. The values are also cached: two US reads minutes apart returned different numbers, so ignore daily swings of a few dozen.
Signal 2: category chart position. Apple's legacy RSS feed returns a country's Top Free chart for one category (use the app's primaryGenreId; 6007 is Productivity):
https://itunes.apple.com/us/rss/topfreeapplications/limit=100/genre=6007/json
It returned at most 100 entries in Extenify's tests, so "not in top 100" is a result in itself. Chart rank reacts to recent downloads much faster than ratings do, which makes it the better signal for spotting a launch or a featuring spike.
Calibrate before you estimate. There is no universal ratings-to-downloads ratio, so derive one:
- Choose an app whose real numbers you know, ideally your own, in the same category.
- Over a 30-day window, divide its First-Time Downloads by the new ratings it gained publicly.
- Multiply a competitor's new ratings over the same window by that ratio.
For example, 24,000 first-time downloads against 300 new ratings gives a ratio of 80. A rival that gained 1,200 ratings that month is then roughly at 96,000 downloads. Treat that as an order of magnitude, and check it against chart position: if you estimate a rival out-downloads you four to one, it should rank well above you too.
Pitfalls that distort the trend
- New rating prompts can multiply the ratings rate overnight while downloads stay flat.
- Rating resets with a new version wipe the summary for all countries. Start a new baseline on that date.
- Charts are per country and device, so a top-10 spot in a small market can mean fewer downloads than #80 in the US.
- Ratings lag downloads by days or weeks, which is why 30-day windows work better than daily ones.
Key takeaways
- The App Store publishes no download count, only rating counts, chart rank and version history.
- Use First-Time Downloads for growth, and keep Updates out of every growth figure.
- The Analytics Reports API gives daily rows that become final within two days, with history from January 1, 2024.
- Estimate competitors from per-storefront ratings plus chart position, calibrated against an app you know.
- Read weekly changes, not totals, and log rating resets.
The original article has the full daily tracking script and a cross-store comparison: read the complete guide to finding and estimating an App Store download count. If you would rather not run a collector yourself, Extenify tracks App Store and Google Play ratings, versions and category rank daily, next to your browser extensions.
What ratio of downloads to ratings have you seen in your own apps?
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