In short
To find profitable app ideas, start from the App Store top grossing chart. Check how old each app is, read its 1- and 2-star reviews for complaints, and see whether it has run Meta ads for months. AppHitlist puts these signals on one page next to estimated revenue, but estimates can be wrong. Pick an app you can beat in one specific way.
Where do you find apps that already make money?
Start with the top grossing chart in the App Store. It ranks apps by revenue, not by downloads. A free app with a subscription can sit high there. A popular free app with no purchases never shows up.
Skip the top ten. Those apps belong to large companies with large teams. Scroll further down and look for products with a plain idea, a small team and a scope you could rebuild in a few months. The middle of the chart is where an indie developer learns the most.
A chart position is a clue, not a revenue figure. Every number you see for an app comes from a model and can be wrong, including the estimates in AppHitlist. Use the numbers to compare your candidates with each other, not to forecast your own income.
Why does the age of an app matter?
The release date tells you what kind of opportunity you are looking at. Old and young apps teach different lessons, so separate them before you compare anything else.
An app that has stayed on a revenue chart for years has lasting demand. People keep paying for it. But the market is settled, so you need a clear reason why a user would switch to you.
An app that reached a revenue chart within a few months of launch shows the window is open right now. Fewer people have copied it yet. In AppHitlist, the Discover page has a New but winning preset for apps released in the last six months that already made a revenue chart.
Check the last update too. An app that still ranks but has been neglected for a long time is a good target. Its users pay for something nobody is improving.
What do unhappy users tell you?
Open the 1- and 2-star reviews of each candidate and read at least thirty. They are free market research, written in your future customers' own words.
Keep a simple tally. Every time a review repeats a problem, add a mark next to that theme. A theme that keeps coming back is a product gap, and it is often a safer bet than any idea you brainstorm yourself. AppHitlist groups low-star reviews into complaint themes, so you don't have to count by hand.
- Billing surprises: trials that charge without warning, unclear renewals.
- Too many ads, or a paywall that blocks the basic job.
- A missing feature that people ask for in many reviews.
- Bugs after an update that never got fixed.
- A confusing first screen that makes users quit.
Does the app run ads, and for how long?
Check whether the app advertises on Meta. An advertiser usually stops an ad that loses money, so an ad that has run for months is probably paying for itself. An ad that has been live for a few days says little. It may just be a test.
AppHitlist lists Meta ad creatives and sorts them by days live, longest-running first within each app. It does not show how much anyone spends, and its ad data comes from the Meta Ad Library for the EU and the UK. So read run time as a hint about what works, not as a budget.
An app with no ads can still earn well through search, word of mouth or the charts. Don't treat ads as a requirement.
How do you choose a gap you can actually fill?
Write the gap in one sentence: X for Y, without Z. For example, a plant care reminder for beginners, without the subscription wall. If you can't finish that sentence, the idea is still too vague.
Then check that the gap is yours to take. You need to build the first version alone, support it, and pay for any servers or content it needs. A great gap that costs more to run than it earns is a trap.
- Better at one job: the leader does ten things badly, you do one well.
- Fairer pricing: a one-time purchase or a cheaper plan for a stable audience.
- A feature the reviews keep asking for.
- A narrower audience: a general tool rebuilt for one profession or hobby.
- A fresher design in a category whose leaders look dated.
What is a one-evening checklist?
You can run the whole process in one evening for a handful of apps. Go in this order, and stop as soon as an idea fails a step.
- Open the top grossing chart and list ten apps from the middle of it that you could build.
- Write down the release date and the last update date for each.
- Read thirty low-star reviews per app and tally the complaint themes.
- Check for Meta ads and note how many days the longest one has been live.
- Drop every app where you cannot name a gap in one sentence.
- Keep the two or three best, then move on to competitor research before you build.