App Discovery Platform IronSource Launches “Fastest Growing Apps” Tool

There’s an ocean of apps out there, but how can you quickly tell which ones are making waves?

Tel Aviv-based app discovery platform IronSource is today announcing one solution, the launch of a free tool that points to the fastest growing apps and app categories.

Appropriately called Fastest Growing Apps, the webpage allows app developers and marketers to get a monthly read on the hottest apps over 500,000 downloads in Google Play. The company said other mobile platforms are in the works.

While gaming categories continue to be popular, VP of mobile sales and operations Omri Halamish told me via email that the rise of the Photography category was “surprising.” He attributed this to interest generated by the recent release of Facebook’s Moments and the Instagram companion app, Layout.

He pegged the Shopping category’s rise to such second-hand merchandising apps as Letgo and Close5.

The tool notices an app once it has hit half a million downloads, he said, because that’s the level which marks the “beginning of an app’s maturity.” Growth is tracked by percentage rather than downloads, so that hot smaller apps might get noticed.

The company said its algorithm takes into account that a single wildly successful app might unfairly boost its category. It analyzes the average growth of app downloads, so as to even out the comparisons between categories.

The goal of the tool, Halamish said, is to illuminate market trends for app developers and help them decide where next to invest their energies. It might be in a hot category or, alternatively, it might be in a less frequented category that has more room to grow.

He also suggested that the gleaned trends could help marketers strategize how to pitch an existing app — through correct category placement, by following the strategies of one of the fast growing apps, or through various app store optimization techniques.

Acknowledging there are “other great app market analytics tools other there,” Halamish said that Fastest Growing Apps has a specific focus on helping to “identify areas of opportunity.”