Which niches are worth building an iOS app in?

The niche question usually arrives as "what should I build?" The honest answer has three parts: where money is moving, what people are asking for, and what you can build better than the apps already there.

The first two have data. The third is yours.

Which niches are growing fastest?

• AI apps. In 2025, spending in generative AI apps nearly tripled to more than $5 billion, and downloads doubled to 3.8 billion. In the second quarter of 2026, spending in the category more than doubled again.
• Health and fitness. Spending hit a record $4.5 billion in 2025, up 13%, while downloads barely moved. People aren't installing more fitness apps; they're paying more for the ones they keep. AI nutrition apps were among the fastest-growing earners.
• Photo and video, productivity, education. These had the biggest earnings growth for US developers from 2019 to 2024, in Apple's own study. Our article on category earnings has the full table.

Is AI a niche or a feature?

Increasingly, a feature. RevenueCat found that 61.4% of Photo & Video subscription apps are AI-powered, and 27.1% of subscription apps overall. Apple's ecosystem study says apps with consumer-facing AI features saw 4 times higher growth in billings in 2025.

So "an AI app" isn't a niche. "Meal logging you can do by describing your plate" is. The niche is the job; AI is how you do it better.

What are people asking for?

When we built pages around problems people bring to search and AI assistants, we checked how they phrase them. Google suggested these on October 16, 2026, which means enough people type them:

A suggestion shows demand, not size. It's a starting point for your own research, not a verdict.

Where are indie makers already building?

On Launch Indie Apps, 17 of the first 30 apps listed (as of October 16, 2026) are health and fitness or productivity apps: habit trackers, journals, focus timers, workout logs. Browse them and you'll see the pattern.

Crowded isn't the same as closed. Our three journaling apps do three different jobs, from three short lines a day to a page for each day of your calendar. A crowded niche just means your app has to say, in one line, what it does differently.

Which niches does Apple say are saturated?

Apple's guidelines name categories where there are already enough apps: dating, flashlights, sound effects, wallpapers, simple timers and fortune telling. New apps there need a clearly different or better experience to be approved at all.

Product Hunt says something similar: it avoids featuring minimal, undifferentiated products that seem focused on making money fast.

How do you pick yours?

Five questions, in order:

1. Would you use it every week? You'll make better decisions for a problem you have.
2. Do people already pay to solve it? A niche with paid competitors has proven demand. One with none might have a reason.
3. Can you say what's different in one line? If not, you're building a copy.
4. Can you reach the people who have the problem? A subreddit, a forum, a newsletter. If you can't name one, launching will be hard.
5. Is it on Apple's saturated list? If yes, be sure your difference is obvious.

What should you avoid?

• Niches owned by giants. Social networks, streaming and dating earn huge sums, but mostly for a handful of companies with network effects you can't copy.
• A thin AI wrapper. A chat box on top of someone else's model is easy to build and easy to replace. Some communities, such as r/iosapps, already route AI-wrapper apps to a separate monthly thread.
• Chasing the biggest number. The fastest-growing niche is also where everyone else is heading.