Indie makers build Productivity apps. The visits go to Food & Drink and Finance.
There are two easy ways to count an indie app category: how many apps are in it, and how much attention those apps actually get. I assumed they would roughly line up. On the live snapshot I looked at, they do not, and the gap is the most useful thing I found for anyone deciding what to build next. All figures below come 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 and counts real first-party visits to their pages, not downloads. The report recomputes live, so the exact numbers will have moved by the time you read this. The shape is the point. Where makers are building By number of tracked apps, the busiest categories were: Category Apps tracked Health & Fitness 41 Productivity 31 Lifestyle 25 Utilities 19 Games 19 Education 16 Finance 13 Food & Drink 13 Nothing surprising. Health, productivity and lifestyle tools are what indie makers love to ship. Where the visits go Now the same catalogue, ranked by recorded visits per category: Category Visits recorded Health & Fitness 360 Food & Drink 331 Finance 320 Education 274 Lifestyle 136 Productivity 89 Travel 73 Utilities 61 Health & Fitness leads both lists, so crowded is not automatically bad. But look at the middle: Productivity is the second most crowded category, with 31 apps, and sits sixth by visits, with 89. Food & Drink and Finance have 13 apps each, the fewest in the top eight, and pull 331 and 320 visits, second and third overall. Education has 16 apps and 274 visits. Put simply: on this snapshot, a Food & Drink or Finance app shared its category’s attention with far fewer neighbours than a Productivity app did. Why this matters more than a download chart A download chart tells you where incumbents already won. In Finance it is a wall of banks and big budgeting brands you will never outspend. A visit count on a board of independent apps asks a different question: where are people looking at small apps right now, and how many other small apps are competing for that look? That second question is the one an indie maker can act on. A crowded category with modest traffic means you are splitting a small pie with many people. A thin category with strong traffic means the pie is bigger and the table is emptier. A few honest caveats: This is one catalogue of a few hundred apps, not the whole App Store. Visits are a snapshot and move daily; a single strong app can pull a category up. The ranking on the board is traffic plus paid sponsorship, and sponsored rows are labelled as sponsored. The category totals above are visit counts, not ranks. Who leads the busy categories The report also names the most visited app in each of the top five categories at the time of the snapshot: Malyatko: Baby feeding tracker in Health & Fitness, Fridgea: Fridge & Grocery List in Food & Drink, STATOK: AI Money Manager in Finance, Flipo: Vocabulary Builder in Education, and Wishbox: Wishlist & Gifts in Lifestyle. None of them is a household name, and that is exactly the signal: in these categories small, focused apps are the ones getting looked at. What I would do with this If I were picking my next indie project, I would not start from “what do I want to build”. I would start from the categories where attention is high and the field is thin, then look at what the current leaders do and where they fall short. The full live breakdown, including platform split and how concentrated the traffic is, is in the Indie App Landscape report. I would love to hear whether this matches what you see in your own category.