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The often-cited 43% figure does not mean that ten apps receive 43% of today’s app visits. Nielsen reported in August 2011 that the ten most-used Android apps accounted for 43% of the time U.S. Android consumers spent in mobile apps. It is a historical measure of app time, not a current count of visits, installs, users, or revenue.
What does the 43% figure actually mean?
Nielsen’s August 2011 article reported that the top ten Android apps accounted for 43% of the time U.S. Android consumers spent using mobile apps. The underlying Nielsen Smartphone Analytics research used on-device meters installed on thousands of iOS and Android smartphones, but this concentration result was specifically about Android consumers in the United States.
The same article said the top 50 Android apps accounted for 61% of app time. Nielsen cited a catalog of more than 250,000 Android apps at the time; the remaining 249,950-plus apps therefore competed for the remaining 39% of app time in aggregate. That did not mean the remainder shared the time evenly. Nielsen’s August 2011 report described an app market in which a relatively small group captured a large share of measured use.
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Don Kellogg, then Nielsen’s Director of Telecom Research & Insights, wrote: “With 250,000+ Android apps available at the time of this writing, that means the remaining 249,950+ apps have to compete for the remaining 39 percent of the pie.” The quote is about that 2011 Android app-time snapshot—not a present-day estimate.
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Do the top ten apps get 43% of all app visits?
No. “Visits” implies a count of openings or sessions, while Nielsen’s figure is a share of time spent inside apps. Those measures can tell different stories: a brief visit counts as one session, but contributes little time; a long session can contribute substantial time without adding many visits. The Nielsen article does not establish a current share of visits across Android, iOS, or all mobile apps.
Keep the units separate when interpreting app-market claims. Time spent, notification events, app installations, active users, sessions, and subscription revenue are not interchangeable. A statistic about one cannot be used as a proxy for another without evidence linking them.
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How many apps make up the long tail?
There is no single count that answers this without specifying the metric and the population. A 2019 observational study of mobile notification drawers recorded 8,823 distinct apps that triggered at least one notification in its dataset. Only 24 apps appeared on at least 1,000 devices. Among the apps found on fewer than 10 devices, more than half appeared on just one device.
That is evidence of a long tail in the study’s notification data, not a count of apps receiving visits or a census of indie-app popularity. Its unit is apps observed triggering notifications across devices. The authors also left long-tail apps uncategorized in one analysis; where categories were used, they came from Google Play, with categories supplied by developers. The 2019 study illustrates how many apps may appear only rarely in a particular kind of activity, but it does not show how often people opened them.
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Can an indie app still find an audience?
The long-tail pattern means many apps appear infrequently in a given dataset; it does not show that every small app lacks an audience or quantify an individual app’s chance of success. The available figures here describe either an older Android app-time distribution or notification activity in a study. Neither measures today’s audience prospects for a new indie app.
For an individual developer, the useful question is narrower: what outcome are you trying to build? A small, engaged group, frequent sessions, notification reach, and recurring subscription revenue are different goals. Evidence about one outcome should not be treated as proof of another.
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Do a few apps also capture most indie app revenue?
One founder’s portfolio offers a limited example of revenue concentration. Matheus Mello reported that, across ten apps, app-store subscription MRR was $64 for June 21–July 19, 2026. Two apps generated 87.5% of that MRR, while six generated none. The article also reports 15 paying subscribers, $87 collected during that 28-day period, and 548 new users across the portfolio.
These figures are a self-reported individual case, not an industry benchmark or audited sample. They cover app-store subscription revenue only and exclude advertising revenue from the founder’s web games; the portfolio was mostly young. Mello also builds SoleOS, a portfolio dashboard discussed in the article, so its product discussion reflects the author’s commercial perspective. The case shows concentration within one small portfolio, not how indie-app revenue is distributed overall. Mello’s July 19, 2026 portfolio account provides the dates and scope of those figures.
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What these figures can—and cannot—tell you
- 2011 Nielsen data: ten Android apps accounted for 43% of U.S. Android consumers’ app time; this is not a current visit share.
- 2019 notification study: thousands of apps triggered notifications, with many observed on very few devices; notification occurrence is not app-session frequency.
- 2026 portfolio account: subscription revenue was concentrated in two of one founder’s ten apps; one self-reported portfolio cannot establish an industry-wide pattern.
Together, the examples show concentration within three distinct measures and scopes. They do not establish today’s all-platform app-visit distribution, the current size or revenue share of the indie-app long tail, or the odds that a particular small app will succeed.
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