Is the card scanner app market saturated? What the App Store US data says

App Store pages list at most 10 in-app purchases and do not order them by price. 1 of these 3 apps filled that limit, so their price is the highest of the items shown, not necessarily the highest they sell. Google Play prints one price range instead, and its upper end is the real top.

Chart read on 30 of the last 30 days.

Only the top-grossing chart counts. Top-paid charts are left out: paid-app sales are thin enough that almost any paid app reaches one. Each category chart lists the 100 highest-earning apps in that category on this store, so the bar is far higher in Games than in Medical.

116 of 122 apps holding a top-10 position have rating readings spanning 14+ days.

App Store rating counts are kept per country, so these are App Store US ratings only. Google Play counts are worldwide. Compare apps within one store, never across the two. A rate is the rise in rating count over the days observed in the last 30 days; a drop of more than half is read as a counter reset and earlier readings are discarded.

Difficulty is the cost of reaching the top, 0–100. "Apps targeting it" counts top-10 apps carrying every word of the keyword in their name or subtitle.

The store shows only a slice of reviews and skews positive — so the shares show which problems dominate, not how many users hit them.

Each 1–2★ complaint was assigned one theme by an AI model. A second AI model re-read 100 random labels in September 2026: about 7 in 10 matched its own pick and 9 in 10 were a reasonable reading. Read the order of the leading themes, not exact shares. Classified on 2026-09-16.