Best time to promote the most popular app categories in the App Store in 2015

A recent research report shows that weekends are often the best time for mobile app developers to promote or launch most new apps. But weekends are still a better time to run an ad campaign to promote your app.

As we all know, the App Store rankings are updated every 3 hours, so the best time to rush to the rankings is at 18:00 when the rankings are updated. According to the survey, the number of App Store app downloads and the natural inflow are the largest at night. The App Store ranking rules are mainly calculated based on the number of downloads of the app in the last three hours. If you want to rank at the top at 18:00 in the evening, you need to maximize the number of downloads between 15:00 and 18:00. During these three hours, the more downloads an app has than its competitors, the higher its ranking will be.

Sensor Tower has discovered the best times to promote apps in different categories on the App Store. While weekends are generally the best days to promote new apps, each app is somewhat different in terms of revenue and downloads, and some even perform better on weekdays.

Here are the best times to promote your new app, covering the most popular app categories on the AppStore:

Books: Sunday (highest revenue); Weekends (higher downloads)

Business: Mid-week, Wednesday or Thursday (highest revenue); Tuesday or Thursday (higher downloads)

Category: Weekend (highest revenue); Weekend-Monday (higher downloads)

Education: Weekend (higher revenue and downloads)

Entertainment: Saturday (highest revenue); Saturday or Sunday (higher downloads)

Finance: Sunday (highest revenue); Weekday (higher downloads — users download on weekdays but play on weekends)

Food and Drink: Sunday (highest revenue); Saturday or Sunday (higher downloads)

Games : Weekend (both revenue and downloads performed well, with slightly better performance on Saturday)

Health & Fitness: Weekends and Mondays (both revenue and downloads performed well)

Lifestyle: Weekends (highest revenue and downloads), Monday and Wednesday (revenue and downloads both decline)

Medical: Wednesday, Thursday, or Sunday (highest revenue), avoid Saturday; Sunday (highest downloads)

Music: Any day except Tuesday; Saturday (revenue surge); weekends (downloads up)

Navigation: Weekends (highest revenue), followed by Fridays; Weekends (higher downloads)

Information: Weekends (highest revenue), avoid Tuesdays; weekends, weekdays are also good (downloads increase)

Magazines: Saturday (highest revenue), avoid Tuesday; weekends (highest downloads)

Photo & Video: Weekend (highest revenue and downloads)

Office: Any Day (Revenue and downloads are relatively evenly distributed)

Reference category: Weekends (highest revenue), followed by Monday and Tuesday; Weekends (highest downloads)

Social Networking: Weekend (highest revenue and downloads)

Sports: Best performing weekend so far (revenue and downloads)

Travel: Weekend (highest revenue and downloads)

Utility: Weekends (highest revenue and downloads), avoid Tuesdays

Weather: Sunday (highest revenue and downloads)

As you can see from the results in the table above, weekends tend to be the best time to promote your app, but there are exceptions. Business apps perform better during the workday, which isn’t surprising since most people buy these apps while they’re in the office or concentrating on work. Meanwhile, downloads of productivity apps were more evenly distributed throughout the week, which is surprising, but just goes to show that "every day is a good time to be productive."

Medical apps are another exception that goes against the general trend. Developers can actually promote these apps more effectively on some weekdays.

However, since most app categories focus on leisure activities such as dining, travel, reading, music, social networking, shopping, etc., users are more likely to discover and purchase such apps during their downtime (that is, weekends).