One of the easiest ways to find great apps, especially new ones that haven't necessarily had time to establish some buzz for themselves is to look at the iTunes Store / App Store categories and top charts, best selling and top grossing free and paid apps for the iPad. In this tutorial, we will show you how to use the App Store to locate these categories and top charts, and go beyond the sampling that Apple gives you initially in the store.
Find best selling and top grossing iPad applications in the App Store
Here's how you locate the top applications of the moment:
- First, tap on the Home button at the bottom of your iPad to get to the Home screen.
- Then, locate the "App Store" icon and tap on it.
- The page or screen that loads initially in the App Store depends on where you last were in the store; either way, you will see a series of buttons at the bottom of the screen.
- Tap on the "Top Charts" button, and a screen will load, with two columns: on the left hand side are listed the "Top Paid iPad Apps", in order of popularity (most popular at the top). In the right column, you'll find the "Top Free iPad Apps". These combine the 10 best sellers and most downloaded iPad apps across all categories.
- Flick your finger down, and you will find a third listing, which displays the first 12 "Top Grossing iPad Apps" at the moment, so this ranking and listing change and are updated all the time.
- Also notice that below the two columns at the top, and below the top grossing listing at the bottom, the App Store displays a "Show More" link: tap on it, and your iPad will list even more top paid apps, top free apps, or top grossing apps than the initial listing you got.
- Since you likely have targeted interests in the types of apps you want, the iPad App Store lets you customize your top apps rankings even further: tap on the "Categories" button in the top left corner of the screen, and a dropdown menu will open: this allows you to narrow down and filter the iPad apps shown based on how they were categorized. Note that new categories are added all the time, and we're now at the point where you have more categories than can be displayed in a "landscape", horizontal view of the iPad screen - make sure to scroll through the menu to see all available categories.
- As soon as you pick an app category, your iPad will refresh the screen, and show you the same three groups as earlier, but this time only for the category you have selected!
In addition to browsing bestselling iPad apps by category, don't forget that you can use the App Store search to find more apps. Just tap inside the search field in the top right corner of the screen, and type either a keyword or an iPad app name, and hit "Search" on the on-screen keyboard or Return on the physical iPad keyboard, and you will see a detailed listing of search results.