Why country availability matters

Presence, not popularity

ChatGPT keeps one global order for its directory. When the same list is compared across countries, the apps that are listed keep their order, and what changes is which apps are there at all. In Popular, the top 9 matched in all 7 countries with Popular data. The full argument is in How ChatGPT orders its app directory.

That makes a country page a presence check. It tells you whether people there can find an app at all. It doesn't tell you whether they use it more or less: the store publishes no usage by country, and a rank is an order, not a count. This is what we mean by country availability.

How far the top apps reach

We took every app that appears in a US top-100 list, 1,136 apps, and checked each one in the 42 countries with data. Most are everywhere. The rest split into three groups:

• 1,066 (94%) are listed in all 42.
• 12 are listed in 30 to 41 countries.
• 26 are listed in 2 to 29.
• 32 are listed in one country, and in every case that country is the US.

Some big names miss only a country or two. Adobe and Figma are listed in 41 of 42, both missing only in Ukraine. Priceline misses Türkiye and Ukraine. Others are regional. Expedia and AT&T appear in 3 countries (Canada, Mexico and the United States), DraftKings in 2 (Canada and the United States), and Ticketmaster in 24 of 42. An app like that is a geo-restricted app, whatever the reason behind it.

Which countries miss the most

Counted country by country, the gaps are uneven. We count the apps listed in the US that a country doesn't list. Every country with data misses at least the 32 US-only apps, so the rest of each count is apps with partial reach. Canada, the closest to the US, misses 37: the US-only apps plus 5 others. The median country misses 54, which is the US-only set plus 22 more.

Put from a user's side: in Ukraine, 63 of the apps a US user sees in top-100 lists don't exist in the directory at all. No country with data lists the full US set. France, the United Kingdom and Canada come closest; Ukraine, Albania and Nigeria are the furthest away.

Finance and Healthcare are the most restricted

By category, the gaps cluster in money and health. 85% of top-100 Finance apps and 87% of Healthcare apps are listed in all 42 countries, against 100% in Productivity. Categories with fewer than 20 apps in a US top-100 list are left out. Other comes third from the bottom at 89%. At the other end, Developer Tools, Education and Productivity are at 99% or more.

The US-only apps make the pattern concrete. Intuit TurboTax, Intuit Credit Karma, WeightWatchers, Your VA Benefits and Hertz Car Rental are among the 32 listed only in the US. 11 of those 32 are Healthcare apps and 9 are Finance. Several serve one country's customers by nature: US tax returns, US credit files, US veterans' benefits.

Six countries without data

OpenApps tracks the directory across 48 countries. Data is not available for six of them (Belgium, Bulgaria, Ireland, Romania, Serbia and Slovenia). We count them as unknown, never as missing: an app with no data there is not absent, only unknown. That is why every share on this page is out of 42, not 48. The glossary entry for country availability defines listed, missing and unknown.

What to do as a developer

1. Check your app's countries. The Availability tab on your app's page marks each of the 48 countries as listed, missing or unknown.
2. Compare with the extremes. The Ukraine and Canada hubs show what is missing in the countries with the most and the fewest gaps, so you can see whether apps like yours are among them.
3. Plan launches country by country. If you build in Finance or Healthcare, check each market before you announce a global launch, and say on your site where the app is available.
4. Check again over time. A country can stop listing an app at any time, so check your app's countries after each release.