Two apps in the same niche, one with three reviews and one with none, both apparently earning five figures a month

Going to caveat this before the numbers, because the caveat is half the post. The revenue figures below come from a tracker that models them from ranking data. They are estimates, nobody at Apple confirmed them, and they could be wrong by a lot.

The review counts are not estimates. Those come straight from the store, and they are what made me stop.

In the authenticator niche I found two apps sitting on estimated five figure monthly revenue. One has three ratings. The other has zero. In a running and trail app about a year old, fifteen. A video editor, forty five. An AI photo app six months old, twenty eight.

For comparison, my own tiny thing has more ratings than three of those and earns approximately nothing.

If even the shape of the estimates is right, the conclusion is uncomfortable for everyone who has spent a year building an audience: in these particular categories nobody is clicking a brand. There is no community, no newsletter, no launch. Somebody types two words into store search, taps the first plausible result and pays.

The honest reading of the other direction: low reviews and high estimated revenue is also exactly what a broken estimate looks like. That is a real possibility and I cannot rule it out from the outside.

Either way the number I keep coming back to is zero ratings. Whatever is happening there, an audience is not part of it.