# step counter app survey · open data · Angel Step > Open data: 19 iPhone step counters with in-app purchase prices read off their store pages, ratings and widget mentions. Free to reuse with attribution. Canonical: https://angelstep.app/data Language: en Updated: 2026-10-05 Whole site in one file: https://angelstep.app/llms-full.txt This file is the markdown twin of the page at the canonical address above: the same words, without markup. Cite the canonical address, not this file. --- what step counters cost: the raw data We read 19 App Store listings by hand and wrote down what they said. The file is public, machine-readable, and free to reuse with credit. It exists because the one number people most want — what an app charges once you've installed it — is not available from Apple's search interface at all. It's only on each app's own page, and only if you scroll. Angel StepCute Pedometer, Daily StepsFree · In-App Purchases · iPhone Scan with your iPhone camera ### What's in it, in four numbers These are the things you can only see once the rows are side by side. None of them are on any other page of this site. Summary of 19 iPhone step counters, US App Store, 17 August 2026 (ours added 29 September) | what | number | out of | | list no in-app purchases at all | 4 | 14 checked for purchases | | mention a widget in their own description | 13 | 19 | | in-app prices run from | $0.99 – $88.99 | the 10 that sell something | | median rating count | 500 | 19, where the largest has 291,037 | Thirteen of the nineteen mention a widget — and only seven mention a lock screen. Those two numbers are worth reading together: on this evidence the word widget on a store listing usually means the home screen alone, so a buyer who specifically wants the count on their lock screen cannot go by that word. Putting steps on the lock screen covers what to do about it. The last row is the one worth sitting with. Half of these apps have about five hundred ratings or fewer, while the biggest has nearly three hundred thousand. This is not a category with a few good options and a few bad ones — it's a very long tail under two or three well-known names, which is exactly why "best step counter app" lists keep recommending the same three. The four that sell nothing at all are Pedometer α, Steps — Simple Pedometer, STEPPI and Plod. That is not the same as "no ads": the App Store doesn't disclose advertising, and a listing with a clean purchases block tells you nothing about it. The file itself is for people building on this rather than reading it: step-counter-survey.json, 7 KB, one record per app, plus the four numbers above as computed fields — or step-counter-survey.csv, the same nineteen rows flat. It is also copied to Hugging Face and Kaggle. If you only wanted the numbers, you already have them. ### How it was measured Each app's App Store page was opened and read. Prices come from the In-App Purchases block on that page — Apple's search interface returns ratings and descriptions but not purchases, which is why every "free step counter" list you've read was probably assembled from marketing text instead. One row is ours. Angel Step went on sale on 29 September 2026 and was added that day, read off its own listing the same way as the others. It has no ratings yet, which pulls the median down: without it, the same count over the other eighteen gives 1,267. Its purchases also set the top of the price range. Two honest limits, stated rather than buried. "Widget per its description" means the listing says so, not that we installed the app and verified one exists. And the numbers age: the file carries its measurement date, and a listing you check today may differ. ### Using it Every row carries its app_store_id, so you can join it to anything else and re-check any figure with one request. Names are not identifiers — when we first matched our own rows by name, six of eighteen matched the wrong app. Take it. The compilation, its structure and the method description are published under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, republish or build on it, with credit to Angel Step, angelstep.app/data. How to cite it: Angel Step (2026). In-app purchases, ratings and widgets of iPhone step counters [Data set]. Measured 17 August 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22032007 The dataset also has a permanent identifier — 10.5281/zenodo.22032007 — which keeps working if this site ever moves, and always points at the most recent measurement. What we do not claim is the facts themselves. Prices and rating counts are Apple's public store listings; nobody owns them, and we're not pretending otherwise. What's ours is the work of collecting them into one file and describing how. ### The same data, written out If you'd rather read than parse, the rows live on three pages, each asking a different question of them: - what step counters actually cost — the prices, per app. - cute step counters — the nine that are pleasant to look at. - simple step counters — the nine that ask least of you. - how to choose one — what the numbers do and don't decide. ### The other dataset This survey says what the store shows. A second dataset says what its customers talk about: what step counter reviews are about — 7,859 reviews of 10 of these apps, counted against 21 themes and split by the rating each reviewer left. It joins to this one on app_store_id, and 6 of its 10 apps are rows here. Neither dataset ranks anything. ### Who made it Angel Step is a step counter for iPhone built around one number, with widgets for the home and lock screen — and the people building it collected these rows by hand, from the same App Store listings anyone can open, read the same way. Angel Step shipped on 29 September 2026, and since that day it is one of the rows here, like any other — measured off its own store page rather than written about by us, with no ratings yet. It is also why there is no ranking on this page. A participant scoring its own market is an advertisement, and these numbers are meant to hold up for someone who has never heard of us — including the reader who takes them and never comes back. Updated 5 October 2026 the app behind this survey. the same numbers, read the same way — our own row included, since the day it shipped.