App Store title length: what 550 top apps do with title and subtitle

I wanted a straight answer to a question I get from almost every developer who signs up: should the App Store title and subtitle use all 30 characters, or is a short brand name fine? Advice on this is mostly opinion, so I pulled the public listings of 550 top free apps in the US App Store and counted. This post is the App Store title length data, the method, and what I would change in a listing because of it.

Short version: half of the top apps use 25 to 30 characters in the title, and almost all of them fill the subtitle. The apps with short titles are mostly brands people already search for by name.

What I collected

On 29 October 2026 (IST) I read Apple's public top free chart for 22 App Store categories in the US, 25 apps per category, 550 apps in total. For each app I took the name, category, rating count and supported languages from Apple's iTunes Lookup API, and the subtitle from the app's public App Store page. No login, no paid data, no estimates. Every number below is a count of what those pages showed that night.

Apple's own limit is 30 characters for the app name and 30 for the subtitle, set out on its product page guidance. None of the 550 titles or subtitles went over 30.

App Store title length: two groups, not one

The median title is 25 characters, but the average is only 21, and the chart shows why. The apps split into two groups:

• Full titles. 280 apps (50.9%) use 25 to 30 characters. 196 (35.6%) use 28 to 30, and 92 (16.7%) use exactly 30.
• Brand only titles. 172 apps (31.3%) use 15 characters or fewer. These are names like Microsoft Teams, Slack, Workday, UPS and Webex.

Just over half of all titles (54.4%) split the name with a colon, a spaced dash, a pipe or an ampersand, the usual pattern of brand first and then a few words about what the app does. A weather app called "AccuWeather: Weather Forecast" is a typical example.

My read: the short titles belong to companies whose users arrive already typing the brand. A new app does not have that demand, so the extra 15 characters are worth using for the words people search for.

Subtitles are almost always full

506 of the 550 apps (92.0%) set their own subtitle. The other 44 show only their category name in that spot, which is what the App Store page does when an app leaves the subtitle empty.

Among the apps with a subtitle:

• The median subtitle is 28 characters and the average 26.7.
• 79.1% use 25 to 30 characters, 56.3% use 28 to 30, and 114 (22.5%) use exactly 30.
• Only 7.9% use 20 characters or fewer.

So the brand only habit does not carry over. Even the apps with very short names mostly fill the subtitle: 145 of the 172 short title apps (84.3%) set one. That is lower than the 92.0% overall, but it is still most of them.

A quarter repeat a word from the title

Apple's search guidance asks you not to repeat words from the app name or subtitle in the keyword field, and the same logic applies between title and subtitle: a repeated word usually spends characters without adding a new search term. I checked every subtitle for words that also appear in the title, ignoring small words like "the", "and", "for" and "app".

129 of the 506 subtitles (25.5%) repeat at least one title word. The most common repeats were music (8 apps), news (6), radar (5) and puzzle (5). Some of these are deliberate, such as a delivery app repeating its own brand, and repetition may help a listing read clearly. Still, if your own subtitle repeats a title word, that is the first place I would look for room.

You can paste your own title, subtitle and keyword field into the free App Store title and keyword checker to see the counts and the repeats for your listing.

By category

Categories differ more than I expected. Business, Productivity and Medical have median titles of 14 to 15 characters, because their charts are full of workplace and health brands. Books, Reference and Weather sit at 28. Every app in the Reference, News, Games, Entertainment and Books samples set a subtitle, while Lifestyle was lowest at 72%.

Each row is the 25 apps in that category's top free chart. With 25 apps per row, one app moves a percentage by 4 points, so treat small gaps as noise.

Rank 1 to 5 against rank 21 to 25

I also compared the top five of each chart (110 apps) with ranks 21 to 25 (110 apps). The median title was 24 characters for the top five and 25 for the lower group. 93.6% of the top five set a subtitle, against 89.1% lower down. That gap is small, and a chart position depends on far more than metadata, so I would not read it as proof that a subtitle moves rank. What the data does show is that filling the subtitle is normal at every level of the chart, not something only the leaders do.

Two other things that stood out

• Updates are frequent. 91.8% of the 550 apps had shipped a version in the last 30 days, and the median gap since the last update was 4 days. Only 0.7% had gone more than a year.
• Many top apps list one language. The median app lists 7 languages, but 29.8% list only one. Finance, Medical, News and Sports all have a median of 1, which fits apps built for a single country. If your app serves more than one market, localized metadata is an area where you may face less competition than you expect. I wrote more about that in app keyword rankings by country.

What I would do with a listing

1. If your brand is not yet something people search for, treat App Store title length as a budget and use 25 to 30 characters: brand, then the main thing the app does.
2. Fill the subtitle. 92% of top apps do. Aim for 26 to 30 characters.
3. Do not repeat title words in the subtitle unless you have a reason. Spend those characters on a second search phrase.
4. Put the remaining search terms in the 100 character keyword field, with no repeats from the title or subtitle.

For choosing which words go where, my App Store keyword research workflow walks through the process I use. If you want to watch whether a change moves your ranks, you can track one app free in ASOClimb.

Method and limits

• Sample. Apple's top free iPhone chart, US storefront, 25 apps for each of 22 categories, read once on 29 October 2026 (IST). Paid and grossing charts were not included. A chart is a snapshot and changes daily.
• Fields. Title, category, rating count, languages and last update date from the iTunes Lookup API. Subtitle from the public App Store web page of each app.
• No subtitle. When an app has no subtitle, the App Store page shows its category name instead. I counted a subtitle equal to the category name as no subtitle. An app whose real subtitle is exactly its category name would be miscounted, and I expect that to be rare.
• Counting. Length is the number of characters as stored, so an emoji or accented letter counts as one. Word repeats ignore case and a short list of small words.
• What it is not. This describes what top apps do. It does not show that any of these choices caused their rank.

Raw summary numbers

The category table above is the full category level summary. If you run the same count for another country and get a different result, I would like to hear about it.