The paid charts are full of narrow tools at 4.7 and above, while the free giants in the same category sit at 3.0

Spent an evening reading the top paid list on the Android side rather than the free one, because almost nobody does, and the contrast with the free charts is sharper than I expected.

What is actually up there: a car diagnostics tool with about 4.6 million purchases, an automation tool at 2.6 million, an NFC utility at 570k rated 4.7, a notification manager at 98k rated 4.7, a comic reader at 110k rated 4.9, an e-reader at 370k rated 4.8. Narrow, unfashionable, sold once for the price of a coffee.

Now the same store's free side. A PDF reader with 18 million installs and nearly 5 million of them recent sits at 3.4. Another at 2.3 million installs sits at 3.0.

So one part of the store has enormous demand and terrible satisfaction, and another part has modest volume and ratings the free apps cannot buy at any price.

Two caveats before anyone quits their job. Paid app ratings are self selected: the people rating already decided to pay, so the grumpiest segment filtered itself out at the door. And install bands are wide, so treat every number here as an order of magnitude rather than a figure.

What survives both caveats is the shape. There is a living market for a narrow tool done properly and sold once, and the huge free categories are being served badly enough that people say so in public, at scale, for years.