Finance Apps Reply to 52.6% of Reviews — Education Apps Barely Clear 43%

We pulled reply rates across seven categories in our catalogue, looking at what share of reviews actually get a response from the developer. Finance came out on top at 52.6%, based on 1,509 apps. Education, the largest category in this comparison at 2,319 apps, sits at the bottom of the list at 43.0%.

That's a 9.6 percentage point gap between the two ends of this particular ranking. Put another way, for every 100 reviews left on a Finance app, roughly 53 get a reply, while an Education app in the same situation replies to about 43.

The middle of the pack is tighter than the extremes suggest. Beauty comes in second at 50.7%, but that's across only 54 apps, so it's a much smaller sample than Finance's 1,509. Travel & Local and Maps & Navigation are tied at 49.0% each, with 1,580 and 1,087 apps respectively — two very different-sized categories landing on the exact same number. House & Home sits close behind at 48.7%, again from a small base of 53 apps. Dating comes in at 44.3% from 48 apps, just ahead of Education at the bottom.

What's worth noticing here is that reply rate doesn't track cleanly with category size. Education has the most apps in this list, 2,319, and the lowest reply rate. Finance has the second-most apps, 1,509, and the highest. If replying to reviews were purely a function of having more competitors to keep up with, you'd expect these two to look similar. They don't.

Finance apps reply to 52.6% of reviews; Education apps, the largest category checked, reply to just 43.0%.

There's also a real difference in what a percentage point means depending on the category. A one-point move in Finance's reply rate reflects behavior across 1,509 apps. A one-point move in Beauty's 50.7% reflects behavior across just 54. Both numbers are real, but they carry different weight, and it's worth keeping that in mind before treating Beauty's second-place finish as equivalent to Finance's.

None of this tells us why Finance apps reply more often than Education apps, or why Travel & Local and Maps & Navigation happen to land on the identical 49.0% figure. It could be regulatory pressure, support team size, the kind of complaints each category attracts, or something else entirely. What the data does show, cleanly, is the ranking itself: Finance leads at 52.6%, Beauty follows at 50.7%, Travel & Local and Maps & Navigation tie at 49.0%, House & Home sits at 48.7%, Dating comes in at 44.3%, and Education closes out the list at 43.0%.

If you're building or maintaining an app in one of the categories near the bottom of this list, the gap to the top isn't abstract. It's the difference between replying to roughly 43 out of 100 reviews and replying to nearly 53. That's not a rounding error — it's a meaningfully different relationship with the people leaving feedback.