App Store categories: how to choose the right category for your app on the App Store and Google Play

Of all the fields in App Store Connect, the category looks like the easiest. Pick one from a menu, move on. Then the app launches, sits at the bottom of a crowded chart, and the question comes back, usually in the words a developer used on the Apple Developer Forums: "I want to change my app category. What are the main consequences?"

App Store categories decide where your app appears when people browse instead of search, which top charts it competes in, and on iPhone and iPad whether it lives under the Apps tab or the Games tab. This guide covers what a category does for browsing and for search, the full lists for the App Store and Google Play, a simple way to choose a primary and secondary category, and what really happens when you change one later.

Key takeaways

• On the App Store, your primary category sets where you appear when people browse, how filtered search results place you, and your Apps or Games tab placement.
• Apple indexes both categories for search and counts the primary one in text relevance, but apps from different categories still compete for the same searches.
• Choose the category your users would look in, then compare how crowded its charts are against your second-best fit.
• On the App Store, a category change ships with your next version and goes through App Review. Expect to start over in the new category's chart.
• Google Play gives you one category plus up to five tags. Tags should be obviously relevant, or they work against you.

What an app category actually does#

Apple's guide to choosing a category says that you can assign two categories, a primary and a secondary, and that "the primary category you select is important for your app's discoverability on the App Store." Specifically, the primary category is where your app appears when people browse the App Store or filter search results, and it decides placement on the Apps tab or the Games tab.

It also feeds two things people often forget:

• Category charts. Top free and top paid charts exist per category, so your category decides which chart you can climb. Our guide to App Store top charts explains how those charts work and how to track your position.
• Time Allowance. Apps with Entertainment or Games as their primary or secondary category appear in the matching Time Allowance category, the screen time controls parents use. Social Media works differently: it is based on whether the app offers social media capabilities, "regardless of the app category selected."

What a category does for search#

Apple's page on App Store search says search results depend on "text relevance (matches for your app's title, subtitle, keywords, and primary category)" and on user behaviour such as downloads, ratings and reviews. It adds: "Your primary category and optional secondary category are indexed by our search algorithm." So your categories are part of what Apple matches a search against.

What they do not do is fence you in. A search for "habit tracker" on the US App Store, checked through the free iTunes Search API at the time of writing, returned apps whose primary category was Productivity next to apps in Health & Fitness. A reply in the forum thread quoted above, from 2017, put it plainly: "Search results are not grouped by category."

In practice, the category is mostly a browse and chart decision with a smaller search effect, and the words people actually type still belong in your name, subtitle and keyword field. Our guide to free ASO keyword research covers that step by step, and an honest category also matters if you hope to get featured on the App Store.

Categories work like library sections: they help people who browse, but most people looking for a specific title search for it by name. Photo: Element5 Digital / Pexels

The full list of App Store categories#

Apple lists these categories on its categories page:

Books, Business, Developer Tools, Education, Entertainment, Finance, Food & Drink, Games, Graphics & Design, Health & Fitness, Kids (iOS and iPadOS only), Lifestyle, Magazines & Newspapers, Medical, Music, Navigation, News, Photo & Video, Productivity, Reference, Safari Extensions, Shopping, Social Networking, Sports, Travel, Utilities and Weather.

iMessage sticker pack apps can also use a separate Stickers category.

A few have narrow definitions worth reading before you pick them. Magazines & Newspapers is for "apps that offer auto-renewing subscriptions to magazine or newspaper content." Medical is for medical education, information management or health reference, while general wellness belongs in Health & Fitness. Lifestyle is the catch-all for "a general-interest subject matter or service," which is exactly why it is crowded with apps that did not fit anywhere else.

Google Play categories and tags#

Google Play splits apps and games, with its own list of categories and tags:

• App categories: Art and Design, Auto and Vehicles, Beauty, Books and Reference, Business, Comics, Communications, Dating, Education, Entertainment, Events, Finance, Food and Drink, Health and Fitness, House and Home, Libraries and Demo, Lifestyle, Maps and Navigation, Medical, Music and Audio, News and Magazines, Parenting, Personalization, Photography, Productivity, Shopping, Social, Sports, Tools, Travel and Local, Video Players and Editors, Weather.
• Game categories: Action, Adventure, Arcade, Board, Card, Casino, Casual, Educational, Music, Puzzle, Racing, Role Playing, Simulation, Sports, Strategy, Trivia, Word.

On top of the category, each app can have up to five tags, which Google says help users "search for and discover the most relevant apps." Google's rule for tags is strict: they should be obviously relevant to someone who has never seen your app. Its own example is a multiplayer vintage car racing game, which should use "Racing" and "Car racing," but not "Stunt driving," and not "Motorcycle racing" or "Truck racing" to attract players of related genres. There are also accessibility tags such as Screen reader-friendly and Motor assistance, which are worth adding if they are true.

You set both in Play Console under Grow users > Store presence > Store settings, in the App category section, with Manage tags for tags. Changes can take up to 24 hours to show on your store page. For the rest of a Play listing, see our guide to Google Play ASO in 2026.

How to choose your primary category#

Apple suggests three questions: your app's purpose, where users "naturally look for an app like yours," and which categories contain the same type of apps. Turn those into a quick, evidence-based process.

Step 1: See where your competitors are#

List ten apps your users would compare you with. You can read their categories on their store pages, or pull them all at once from the free iTunes Search API:

curl -s "https://itunes.apple.com/search?term=habit+tracker&entity=software&country=us&limit=25" \
  | jq '.results[] | {trackName, primaryGenreName, genres, userRatingCount}'

primaryGenreName is the primary category, and genres lists every category the app is in. For habit trackers, this shows a real split: some of the best-known apps sit in Productivity with Health & Fitness as a second category, and others the other way round.

Step 2: Shortlist two honest fits#

Write down the two categories that would make sense to a user. If you need to explain why your app belongs in a category, it is not an honest fit, and Apple says choosing inappropriate categories "is against the App Review Guidelines" (section 2.3, on accurate metadata).

Step 3: Compare how hard each chart is#

For both candidates, open the category's top free chart in your main country and look at the apps around positions 20 to 100. Their rating counts, which userRatingCount also returns, are a rough proxy for how much download volume it takes to be there. A category where the apps at rank 50 have a few hundred ratings is a very different climb from one where they have tens of thousands.

Step 4: Decide, and use the secondary category for the other fit#

Pick the category where users would look first, unless the second fit is both honest and clearly easier to chart in. Then put the other one in the secondary category. Apple indexes the secondary category for search too, but it does not say how much weight it carries, so treat it as a second place to be found, not as a ranking lever.

People sort their own home screens by what an app is for. Your category should match the folder they would put you in. Photo: Bastian Riccardi / Pexels

Special cases: games, kids and stickers#

• Games. If your app is a game, you can choose up to two Games subcategories, such as Puzzle or Strategy. Players browse those subcategories and their charts, so they matter more than the secondary category does for most apps.
• Kids. Apps for children aged 11 and under use the Made for Kids checkbox and an age band (5 and under, 6 to 8, or 9 to 11), and can still appear in another primary and secondary category. Be sure before you tick it: App Store Connect says that once a Made for Kids app is approved, "this selection cannot be changed and all subsequent updates will need to follow the Kids category guidelines."
• Stickers. Standalone sticker pack apps can use the Stickers category in the App Store for iMessage, but they are not shown in categories on the App Store for iPhone and iPad. They are found only through search.
• Mac apps. For macOS, you also set the category in Xcode, and the primary category in App Store Connect should match it.

Changing your category later#

This is where most of the confusion lives, and where some ASO advice online is simply wrong about the App Store.

On the App Store#

Apple's table of required, localizable and editable properties lists Primary Category and Secondary Category among the properties that cannot be edited at any time: they change with a new version. An Apple developer news post put it simply: you can change the categories and subcategories associated with your app "at any time with an app update." In practice:

1. Prepare a new version in App Store Connect.
2. Change the category under App Information.
3. Submit the version. App Review checks the new category along with the rest of your metadata, so it must be an honest fit.

What happens to your chart position is not documented by Apple. The developers who have reported it are consistent, though. One wrote in 2019 that after a change "we lost our rankings for that category (zero'd)," and another in 2022 that "you will be completely unlisted from the original category, and will have to start gaining ranking in the new category." Your ratings and reviews stay with the app; your chart position in the old category does not come with you. Change categories when the new one fits better for the long run, not to chase a chart for a week.

On Google Play#

You can change the category and tags in Store settings without a new release, and changes can take up to 24 hours to appear. Google asks you to change tags "only after significant changes to an app's content or functionality," and then to re-evaluate all five.

Common category mistakes#

• Choosing the emptiest chart instead of the right audience. A high rank in a category nobody browses for your kind of app brings few installs, and it can draw an App Review rejection under the accurate-metadata guidelines.
• Picking a category only for its search value. Apple indexes categories, but it says choosing irrelevant ones "is grounds for rejection by App Review." Put the words people search for in your name, subtitle and keyword field.
• Picking Lifestyle by default. It is broad and crowded. Check whether a more specific category fits first.
• Filling all five Google Play tags with near-misses. Five obviously relevant tags beat five optimistic ones.
• Changing category to fix a visibility problem that is really a search problem. If people cannot find you even by name, start with why an app is not showing in App Store or Google Play search.

Visibility that does not depend on your category#

Category charts reward apps that already have download volume. A new app needs some of its first visitors to come from outside the store: a website, communities, press, and listings that send people to its store page. On AppRanker, the board is a single list for every store and every category, and rank is a plain sort on what each listing has paid, with each row linking straight to your App Store or Google Play page. Paste your store link on the home page to see the current price of each position. And if you share your own links, keep them on a domain you control; our guide to Firebase Dynamic Links alternatives explains why.

Checklist: choosing App Store categories#

• List ten competitors and record their primary and secondary categories.
• Shortlist two categories that a user would recognise as honest fits.
• Compare the top free charts of both in your main country, around ranks 20 to 100.
• Set the primary category to where users look first; use the secondary for the other fit.
• For games, choose up to two subcategories.
• Only tick Made for Kids if you are sure: it cannot be undone after approval.
• On Google Play, set the category and up to five clearly relevant tags, including accessibility tags that apply.
• If you change category on the App Store, ship it with a planned version and expect to restart in the new chart.

FAQ#

Does the App Store category affect search ranking?#

Partly. Apple says text relevance includes matches for your primary category and that both categories are indexed by its search algorithm. But categories do not limit which searches you can appear in: apps from different categories show up for the same terms, and your name, subtitle and keyword field carry more of the search work.

Can I change my app's category without submitting an update?#

Not on the App Store. Primary and secondary categories change with a new app version, which goes through App Review. On Google Play you can change the category and tags in Store settings at any time, and the change can take up to 24 hours to appear.

Will I lose my ranking if I change categories?#

Your ratings and reviews stay with the app. Developers who changed category report that they lost their position in the old category's chart and had to climb the new one from scratch, so plan the change rather than experimenting with it.

What is the difference between a primary and secondary category?#

The primary category is the one Apple uses for browsing, filtered search results and Apps or Games tab placement. The secondary category is optional and gives you a second place to be browsed. Games can also choose up to two Games subcategories.

How many tags can I add on Google Play?#

Up to five. Google asks that each one be obviously relevant from your store listing or first in-app experience, and that you choose the five most strongly associated with your app if more apply.

Image credits#

• Cover, a phone showing a Social Networks folder: photo by Tracy Le Blanc on Pexels, Pexels License. Cropped to 1200x630.
• Library shelves sorted by subject: photo by Element5 Digital on Pexels, Pexels License. Resized.
• Social media folder on a phone: photo by Bastian Riccardi on Pexels, Pexels License. Resized.