State of ASO 2026: What 460,000 Keywords Reveal

Most ASO advice is vibes. "Target long-tail keywords." "Some categories are competitive." Sure, but how much? By how many points? Where exactly does the winnable stuff live?

So we pulled the numbers. This is a look at 460,000 keyword-and-market combinations tracked in Applyra's database across the App Store and Google Play, scored for difficulty and search traffic. No survey, no opinions. Just what the data says about ranking an app in 2026, and what it means if you are an indie developer without an enterprise budget.

Google Play is harder than the App Store

This one surprised me by how clear it was. Google Play is not a little harder to rank in. It is a lot harder.

On the App Store, a third of keywords are genuinely easy. On Google Play, fewer than one in ten are. And hard keywords are more than three times as common on Google Play.

The reason is structural. Apple hides your keywords in a 100-character field and indexes a narrow set of signals. Google Play indexes your entire description, your reviews, even backlinks. More surface area indexed means more apps end up competing for the same terms, so the average term is more contested. If you ship on both stores and you are choosing where to fight first, iOS gives you more openings.

The long-tail advantage, measured

Everyone says target long-tail keywords. Almost nobody tells you the actual pay-off. Here it is, by keyword length.

The pattern is real, and it is bigger on Google Play. A single-word term on Google Play averages 60 difficulty. Add a second word and it falls to 46. That is a 14-point drop for one extra word.

But look at the traffic column, because this is the part the vibes-based advice skips. Traffic falls just as fast. That single word pulls a traffic score of 50; the three-word phrase pulls 17. Long-tail is not a free lunch. It is a trade: you swap one hard, high-traffic term for several easier, lower-traffic ones that add up.

The winnable keywords are rarer than you think

Here is the number that should change how you do keyword research. A keyword is only worth your time if it is both winnable and searched. Winnable but nobody searches it is vanity. High traffic but impossible to rank is a waste.

So we counted the keywords that are both: difficulty under 40 and a traffic score of 30 or higher.

Fewer than 7 percent of App Store keywords, and barely 2 percent on Google Play, sit in that sweet spot. The other 90-plus percent are too hard, too quiet, or both.

This is why scattershot keyword research fails. If you brainstorm 100 terms and target the ones that "feel right," you are statistically drowning in the 93 percent that will not move your downloads. The whole job is finding that thin slice, which is exactly what a difficulty-and-traffic score is for.

Which categories are hardest

Difficulty lives at the keyword level, not the category level, but some categories are structurally more crowded. Here is the average keyword difficulty by App Store category, limited to categories with a large enough sample to trust.

Games, Utilities and Productivity are the meat grinders. That tracks: they are enormous, mature categories where well-funded apps have optimized for years. Photo & Video, Education and Books are, on average, more forgiving.

Do not over-read this. A category average hides a lot, and there are winnable keywords in Games and brutal ones in Books. But if you are pre-launch and choosing how to position a flexible app, the easier neighborhoods are worth knowing.

What this means if you are an indie developer

Four takeaways, straight from the data:

1. Start on iOS if you can choose. A third of App Store keywords are easy versus under a tenth on Google Play. Early wins are easier to come by, and early wins build the download velocity that unlocks harder terms later.
2. Stop bidding for single words. They are the hardest and the most contested, especially on Google Play. Build a basket of two and three-word phrases instead.
3. Hunt the 2-to-7 percent. Most keywords are not worth targeting. The entire skill is filtering for the ones that are both winnable and searched, then writing your metadata around them.
4. Weigh the category, not just the keyword. If your app could plausibly sit in more than one category, the difficulty gap between, say, Utilities and Education is real.

None of this needs an enterprise tool. It needs difficulty and traffic data for the keywords you are considering, which is the core of what an ASO tracker does. You can check any keyword's difficulty and traffic free, no account, with Applyra's keyword tool. I walk through the full method in the complete ASO guide for indie developers.

A note on the data

These figures come from Applyra's tracked keyword universe, roughly 460,000 keyword-and-market pairs across both stores. That is a large sample, but it is the keywords indie developers and small studios actually track, not a census of every term in existence. Difficulty and traffic are model scores from live store signals, not Apple's or Google's internal numbers, which nobody outside those companies has. Treat the exact decimals as directional and the patterns as solid, because the patterns hold across hundreds of thousands of keywords.

The bottom line

ASO in 2026 is not a mystery, but it is a filtering problem. Most keywords are too hard or too quiet to matter. Google Play is harder than iOS. Long-tail helps, at the cost of traffic. And the keywords actually worth your time are a thin slice you have to go find on purpose.

The developers who win are not the ones targeting the most keywords. They are the ones targeting the right 3 percent. If you want to see difficulty and traffic scores for your own keywords on both stores, that is what Applyra does, with a permanent free plan to start. And if you are still choosing a tool, here is the full field for indie developers.

Find your winnable keywords free with Applyra →