How is the position of applications in the Appstore and Google Play calculated?

Question

Android

How do they determine the positions of applications in the ratings in the Appstore and Google Play? Based on downloads or based on usages (for example, how many total hours did all users spend in each app in the last period)?

Answer 1

Depends on thousands of parameters, some directly affect the position of the application, some indirectly, you can dream up and deduce the main ones:
1. ASO - the user finds the application by keywords
2. Localization - affects the user experience, whether the user will understand how to use the application before downloading and after
3. Number of deletions / number of installations (for the last hour / day / month) - means that the application that the user found meets or does not meet his expectations, or goes out of fashion for some reason, otherwise Angry Birds would still be in the top
4. App rating - the overall user experience of the app
5. App conversions in the last hour/day/month - to maximize profits at the current moment
6. Last update date - the developer takes care of fixing bugs, new features
7. Replies to comments - the developer communicates with the audience, thereby the average rating grows, see point 4
One way or another, Apple and Google care about their brand and user experience, maybe they are trying here and now to get the maximum profit ( point 5 ), but they understand that this is a long game, which means everyone should get a chance to win otherwise holdings with big budgets would not let the little ones into this juicy pie. Therefore, empires die and new ones take their place, but you just have to create new games and applications and look for new niches, of which there are an infinite number.
The law of large numbers and probability theory will help you, the more attempts, applications, optimizations, localizations you make, the higher the chance to get more sweet pie.