App Market Research in 2026: How to Choose the Best Country & Category

App Market Research in 2026: How to Choose the Best Country & Category

It’s rare when the biggest market is the best fit. Reliable market research should point your team in a direction where it can gain traction: where your app can solve a clear problem for an audience that is reachable, serviceable, and can be developed. 

And the best fit for any app shifts and evolves with every variable: country, category, platform, and app monetization model. 

In a recent episode of ROI 101, “Mobile App Trends 2026: Downloads & Revenue by Category and Country”, Tenjin’s Roman Garbar sat down with Mariusz Gąsiewski from Google to discuss how the global app landscape is changing. The global trends show growth is happening, but it is unevenly distributed. Its pace is faster in different spaces and the challenge becomes pinpointing the right variables that amplify your app’s best opportunity structure. 

This guide distills that conversation into a practical framework for founders, product teams, and app marketers. Feel free to use it to weigh key variables: countries, categories, and platforms before you commit to major decisions or consider budget.

What You’ll Learn

• Evaluate combinations, not “the global market.”
  Country, category, and platform together define your real opportunity.
• Downloads and revenue answer different questions.
  Read them side by side, never interchangeably.
• Category growth often breeds concentration.
  Carefully study the leaders before you enter.
• Tier 2 markets deserve scrutiny, but trends differ sharply by platform.
• Niche expertise is a genuine distribution advantage.
• Test before you commit.
  One growth chart is a hypothesis, not a strategy.

What is App Market Research? 

App market research determines whether a specific product has a viable opportunity with a specific audience. When performed well, it should be clarify:

• Which problem(s) your app solves, and who experiences it
• The different countries where that audience is reachable
• Which category and what sort of competitors you will face and be compared to
• Types of demand signals, including downloads, search behavior, and community interest
• Best type of monetization fit for your app and target region: subscriptions, in-app purchases, advertising, or a hybrid
• Platform differences across Android, iPhone, and, where relevant, iPad

All of these aspects resist the temptation to size “the global app market” as a complete, single opportunity. It’s more useful to use precise combinations instead: a fitness app for first-time runners in Mexico on Android, or a drawing app for professional users in Germany on iPad. Each carries its own competitors, acquisition routes, user expectations, and unit economics.

The distinction is consequential. A market can be vast but saturated, fast-growing but stubborn to monetize, or modest yet accessible through a community your team already understands.

Downloads and Revenue are Different Signals

Download statistics not only show how popular an app may be, but they also are a strong signal source for measuring adoption. It’s a number that doesn’t reveal much about users’ behavior, whether they stay, pay, or go. There’s also a lack of information about how they were acquired. Although app store revenue indicates a willingness to spend, it still excludes ad-supported businesses and other payments made outside an app store.

That’s why it is important to look at both downloads and revenue together, as if they were siblings. Each answers a distinct question and the combination gives your team a far sharper picture.

Mariusz’s 2024 to H1 2026 report illustrates this gap quite distinctly. Let’s take a look at Google Play Store’s non-gaming country data for Q3 2025 through Q2 2026:

Neither figure tells you where to launch. But together they show why a download-led shortlist and a revenue-led shortlist can diverge. 

Look at the entire scope of a market report before you rely on its data. For example, these revenue figures cover store-billed subscriptions and in-app purchases only. They do not include advertising revenue and payments completed outside Google Play or the Apple App Store. So any ad-led app would need additional evidence before your team can estimate its full business potential.

A Simple Country & Category Framework

This framework should be treated as a research checklist. Collect and record every assumption that you might have about your metrics and measuring points. For example, “Spanish-language onboarding will improve activation in this market” would be a testable hypothesis, but not a conclusion you can draw directly from download growth. There are many other metrics at play. 

Category Growth Can Hide the Competition

Wanting to become part of a new booming category is a useful context. It can draw well-funded competitors and tends to consolidate revenue among a handful of leaders.

Mariusz captured the dynamic:

“The revenue concentration in [those] non-gaming categories is pretty harsh, cruel and, of course, rewarding for many people as well.”

In his report on Google Play non-gaming data, Top 10 apps capture 39% of measured revenue in 2026, with 9% growth since 2019. Please note: 2026 data is still partial-year through July and excludes China, so this isn’t a full-year market share figure. 

For a new app this sort of concentration is not a reason to retreat, rather a reason to study the incumbent winners and see what they do well:

• Which user do they need to serve exceptionally well?
• Which audiences or use cases do they overlook?
• Are they built for a broad global audience where you could serve a sharper one?
• Is your differentiation compelling enough that users would switch, or choose you first?

While category data tells you where to look, data like reviews, user interviews, creator conversations, and product tests tell you whether or not there’s room for your app.

Consider Another Region and Tier 2 Markets

While major Tier 1 markets like the US remain formidable revenue markets, these shouldn’t be the reactive answer to every single growth question. Larger markets often mean denser competition, steeper acquisition costs, and product expectations your team might not be ready for.

The conversation between Mariusz and Roman points to other large countries with sizable markets worth investigating: Turkey, Mexico and Vietnam. These three markets are universally cheaper or easier, nor are they suited to every app. However, they are strong candidates to consider against your product fit and ability to reach an audience. 

Let’s have a look at the report’s iOS country comparison, which offers instructive, directional examples:

• Mexico’s H1 2026 revenue growth above 50% year over year, with download growth in the low single digits.
• Turkey and Vietnam: positive growth on both revenue and downloads.

But, the same country can tell a different story on a different platform. On Android, Turkey shows positive revenue growth but negative download growth in the 2026 comparison.

When it comes to country selection, the type of platform is a key variable with much differentiation. Don’t blend an Android trend and an iOS trend into a single “Turkey growth rate.” Instead, ask which device mix, payment behavior, usage patterns, and distribution routes suit your app.

Measuring Regional Value

While data and charts can help surface candidates, they don’t always deliver the in-depth information you need to truly understand who and what your target audience is and what they are looking for. 

1. Do we understand the audience?
Language, cultural references, payment habits, and daily routines all reshape what a “good” app looks like.

2. Are we able to reach our audience?
A credible community, creator relationship, or content channel is an advantage that never appears in market-size data.

3. Do we have to adapt the product? Could we execute it well?
Localization goes well beyond translation. It spans pricing, onboarding, support, content, and compliance.

4. Does our current business model work there? Do we have to consider another app monetization model for this region or audience?
Subscription-first, ad-supported, and hybrid models fit differently in every market.

Roman observed that developers sometimes start in the US, collide with heavy competition, and then pivot to a market they know better. He cited teams serving their home markets in France, the UK, and Brazil. These are observations from the conversation rather than named case studies, but the strategic lesson holds: proximity to an audience is an asset.

As Mariusz put it:

“You can start from your own market and then see how you want to develop.”

Remember, starting locally doesn’t cap your ambition. It gives your team a sharper problem, a more credible route to users, and richer product feedback before you expand.

Turn Niche Knowledge into an Advantage

As AI-assisted development tools have lowered the cost of testing a product, the harder parts of building a business remain, but narrower opportunities are now worth pursuing.

Mariusz definitely doesn’t think that anyone can prompt their way to a successful app. His main point is that people with deep knowledge of a specific audience, almost like a sociologist, can now build products that once would have been too costly to justify:

“They are not necessarily experts in the technical stuff, but they are really experts in very specific niches or subcategories.”

Consider someone who has run an online community for fishing enthusiasts for years. They likely understand that group’s recurring frustrations, vocabulary, and most devoted members better than any generalist publisher. With development costs falling, a focused app for that community becomes a realistic experiment.

Another example: a football app that launches in Poland. Once the team truly understands that audience, it can test expansion into a neighboring country, or broaden into an adjacent sport like basketball. The lesson isn’t to clone one niche across every market. It’s to expand from evidence: an audience you understand, a problem users recognize, and a distribution route you can access.

Build a Test-Ready Shortlist

Narrow your options to two to five country, category, and platform combinations. For each, document the evidence you have and the assumption you still need to prove.

It’s not recommended to stake a major market entry on just one growth chart. Rather, try running focused tests that can provide more evidence: user interviews, a localized landing page, a small creative test, or an invite-only release. Define in advance which sort of result would make you continue, revise, or stop.

Market research is about understanding the where and for whom. The next step is figuring out how your app can earn money and turn profit. Read our guide about hybrid monetization models before assuming one revenue model will suit every audience. Once you have a defensible market hypothesis, use it to shape your app user acquisition strategy.

It’s a Decision Process, Not Ranking

The most promising market is rarely the one with the biggest number in isolation. It’s the one where a genuine user problem, a reachable audience, the right platform, and a workable business model converge.

So, use downloads and revenue to form hypotheses and do local research to challenge them. Then let focused tests decide whether that opportunity deserves to scale.