There Is No Such Thing as Iran’s iPhone Share
Every reach figure Tehran Index has published about an Iranian consumer app has been an Android figure, and so is every one this desk has found in English anywhere else. Tehran Index has now read a domestic iOS catalogue twice, 3,251 listings on the second pass. For the sixteen companies captured on both platforms on the same day, the iOS download figure runs from 0.09 percent of the Android figure to 12.90 percent, and across the ten pairs large enough for the rounding not to matter it still runs 0.09 to 5.20 percent, a 56-fold spread. The iOS share is a property of the app, not of the country. The two platforms do not even publish the same live field: the rating count moves on 88.7 percent of Cafe Bazaar listings in a week and on 10.2 percent of Sib App ones.
- Tehran Index read the Sib App catalogue in full on 21 and 28 September 2026, 3,251 listings on the second date, and matched 59 of them to a company on the register by the registrable domain of the website each listing publishes. The other 3,192 are held rather than guessed: 1,878 publish no website at all, 1,313 publish a domain matching no company we hold, and one is ambiguous. The join is never the app name and never the bundle identifier, because apps are re-signed for domestic distribution and a catalogue of borrowed names is where matching by resemblance produces a confident wrong answer.
- Sixteen companies were captured on both Cafe Bazaar and Sib App on 28 September. The iOS download figure as a share of the Android one runs from 0.09 percent for Basalam to 12.90 percent for Exir, a 140-fold spread, median 1.42 percent. Restrict it to the ten pairs whose iOS figure is 10,000 or more, so the store’s own rounding is at most about 5 percent of the value, and the range is 0.09 to 5.20 percent, a 56-fold spread, median 1.54 percent. There is no single iOS share to apply to an Iranian company.
- The ordering is suggestive and it is not a demonstration. The four highest shares after the smallest pairs are stripped out belong to companies selling a considered purchase: Alibaba.ir at 5.20 percent, Tapsi at 4.97, Digikala at 3.38 and Filimo at 2.34. Three of the four lowest are free mass-reach apps: Basalam at 0.09, Divar at 0.70 and Balad at 0.91. The fourth is the exchange Excoino at 0.86, which sits between them and is the first thing that spoils the story. The obvious explanation is handset price and customer spend, and this piece measures none of those. The crypto exchanges sit at every point on the range from 12.90 percent down to 0.25 percent, which is not what a clean income story would produce.
- The two platforms do not publish the same live field, which inverts what this desk established for Android. Between 21 and 28 September the rater count moved on 88.7 percent of 62 matched Cafe Bazaar listings and on 100 percent of 47 matched Myket listings, while the install band moved on 21.0 and 4.3 percent. On Sib App the rating count moved on 10.2 percent of 59 matched listings and the download figure moved on 16.9 percent. Digikala’s iOS listing gained two raters and ten thousand downloads in that week; its Cafe Bazaar listing gained 528 raters and no downloads. A growth signal has to be taken from a different field on each platform, and the two cannot be assembled into one series.
- Even the denominator is contested, and the piece publishes the version that weakens its own headline. Measured against Myket rather than Cafe Bazaar, the fifteen available pairs give a median iOS share of 2.48 percent and a range of 0.13 to 27.50 percent. Alibaba.ir reads 5.20 percent against one Android store and 13.00 percent against the other. Neither is wrong: Iran’s two Android stores publish a different number for every app they share, so the iOS share is a range measured against a range and the store has to be named with the figure.
Every reach figure Tehran Index has published about an Iranian consumer app has been an Android figure, and so is every one this desk has found in English anywhere else. The App Index has been counting Cafe Bazaar since 29 June 2026 and Myket since 20 August, and both of them measure the same half of the market. Iranian apps reach iPhones through domestic stores instead, and until 21 September 2026 this desk had no series on any of them. We now have two captures of one, and they say something more useful than a number.
There is no such thing as the iPhone share of an Iranian app. Across the sixteen companies we captured on both platforms on 28 September, the iOS download figure runs from 0.09 percent of the Android figure to 12.90 percent. Strip out the six pairs small enough for the store’s own rounding to matter and the range is still 0.09 to 5.20 percent across ten companies, a 56-fold spread, with a median of 1.54 percent. An allocator who takes one company’s ratio and applies it to the next can be wrong by a factor of 56.
What the capture actually is
Sib App publishes a catalogue of 3,251 listings and a rounded download integer against each one. That integer is a far finer instrument than the band Cafe Bazaar prints, and it is still an estimate the store made rather than a count. Of the 3,251 we can name the company behind 59. The rest are held: 1,878 listings publish no website at all, 1,313 publish a domain matching no company on our register, and one is ambiguous. We match on the registrable domain of the website the listing itself publishes, corroborated by the state trust seal, because on this platform neither the name nor the bundle identifier is evidence of anything. Apps are re-signed for domestic distribution, so Divar is ir.divar on Cafe Bazaar and studio.digitalnomads.Divar on Sib App. Matching by resemblance in a catalogue of re-signed builds is exactly how a confident wrong answer gets made.
| Company | Sector | Cafe Bazaar | Myket | Sib App | iOS as % of Bazaar |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Exir | Crypto | 6,200 | 4,000 | 800 | 12.90 |
| Alibaba.ir | Travel | 5,000,000 | 2,000,000 | 260,000 | 5.20 |
| Tapsi | Mobility | 19,000,000 | 10,000,000 | 945,000 | 4.97 |
| Bidarz | Crypto | 9,900 | not captured | 400 | 4.04 |
| Digikala | E-commerce | 34,000,000 | 25,000,000 | 1,150,000 | 3.38 |
| Filimo | Media | 22,000,000 | 18,000,000 | 515,000 | 2.34 |
| Nobitex | Crypto | 5,500,000 | 4,000,000 | 87,000 | 1.58 |
| Digipay | Fintech | 6,600,000 | 4,000,000 | 99,000 | 1.50 |
| Arzinja | Crypto | 120,000 | 29,000 | 1,600 | 1.33 |
| Aban Tether | Crypto | 910,000 | 700,000 | 8,900 | 0.98 |
| Balad | Mobility | 38,000,000 | 14,000,000 | 345,000 | 0.91 |
| Excoino | Crypto | 1,400,000 | 500,000 | 12,000 | 0.86 |
| Divar | Classifieds | 110,000,000 | not captured | 770,000 | 0.70 |
| MyWallet | Crypto | 300,000 | 300,000 | 1,700 | 0.57 |
| OmpFinex | Crypto | 480,000 | 400,000 | 1,200 | 0.25 |
| Basalam | E-commerce | 13,000,000 | 9,000,000 | 12,000 | 0.09 |
The ordering is suggestive, and it is not a demonstration
Read the table from the top and a pattern presents itself. The companies with the highest iOS share sell a considered purchase: Alibaba.ir at 5.20 percent sells flights and hotels, Tapsi at 4.97 percent sells rides, Digikala at 3.38 percent and Filimo at 2.34 percent sell goods and a subscription. Three of the four at the bottom are free mass-reach apps. Balad, a navigation app with 38 million Android installs, reaches 0.91 percent. Divar, which carries the largest Android figure in our capture at 110 million, reaches 0.70 percent. Basalam, a marketplace of independent sellers, reaches 0.09 percent. The fourth is the exchange Excoino at 0.86 percent, sitting between Divar and Balad, which is the first thing that spoils the story.
The obvious reading is that an iPhone is the expensive handset and its owner is the higher-spending customer, so the apps that monetise a transaction skew towards it while the free utilities do not. That reading is plausible and this piece does not demonstrate it. We have measured no handset prices, no incomes and no basket sizes, and the crypto exchanges in the table sit at every point on the range from 12.90 percent down to 0.25 percent, which is not what a clean income story would produce. What can be said without inference is the part that matters commercially: the iOS share is a property of the individual app, not of the country, and anybody scaling an Android number into a market figure is assuming a correction our data says is not there.
The two platforms do not publish the same live field
The second finding is about the instrument, and it inverts what this desk established for Android. Our earlier work on the two Android stores found that the install figure is a stale bucket and that the rater count is the only field behaving like a series. Between 21 and 28 September that held again, on a wider panel: the rater count moved on 88.7 percent of 62 matched Cafe Bazaar listings and on 100 percent of 47 matched Myket listings, while the install band moved on 21.0 and 4.3 percent.
On Sib App it is the other way round. The rating count moved on 10.2 percent of 59 matched listings in the same week, and the download figure moved on 16.9 percent. Digikala’s iOS listing gained two raters and ten thousand downloads; its Cafe Bazaar listing gained 528 raters and no downloads at all. So a reader who wants a growth signal has to take the rating count on Android and the download count on iOS, and the two cannot be assembled into one series. One week is a short window and we say so: the iOS series is two captures old and this is the only interval it has.
A star rating that turned out to be nothing
The draft of this piece carried a finding that did not survive its own check. Across the sixteen paired companies the Sib App rating is higher than the Cafe Bazaar rating on eleven of them, with a mean gap of plus 0.736 of a star. That is a large number and it is meaningless. Twenty of the 59 Sib App listings carry five or fewer ratings and thirteen of those twenty show exactly 5.00, which is what a handful of ratings does to an average. Require a hundred ratings before a listing counts and the set falls to eight pairs, the iOS score is higher on three of them, and the mean gap collapses to plus 0.011 of a star. The iOS rating field on this store is not usable below a few hundred raters, and the 0.736 is printed here only so that nobody else publishes it.
Even the denominator is contested
One more caution, and it comes out of our own record. Every ratio above is measured against Cafe Bazaar. Measure the same companies against Myket instead and the fifteen pairs available give a median of 2.48 percent and a range of 0.13 to 27.50 percent. Alibaba.ir reads 5.20 percent against one Android store and 13.00 percent against the other. That is not an error in either measurement. It is the finding of the earlier piece arriving one layer down: Iran’s two Android stores publish a different number for every app they share, so the iOS share is a range measured against a range. Name the store or do not quote the number.
What we do not know
We do not know Sib App’s share of Iranian iOS distribution, and without it none of this scales to a market. Sibche runs a second catalogue with an exact download integer behind its app, and the App Index has one partial capture of it; Anardoni and Charkhoneh have no capture in the App Index at all. We do not know whether an install on a re-signed domestic build behaves like an install on either Android store, or whether the same person appears on more than one iOS catalogue, so no iOS figure here is a device count and none of them may be added together. We cannot tell, from our data, whether a company absent from one capture has no listing or merely was not in that panel, because the Android side is a curated package list and the iOS side is a full catalogue filtered to domains we already hold. And we hold no evidence at all on the question the table invites: who the iPhone customer is, what they spend, and whether the ordering above would survive being regressed on anything.
The series is two weeks old. Every weekly capture from here makes it worth more, and the first thing it should settle is whether the 56-fold spread is stable or whether it was one Monday.
Cite as: Tehran Index, “There Is No Such Thing as Iran’s iPhone Share”, 29 September 2026. Computed from the Tehran Index App Index: the Sib App catalogue of 3,251 listings and the Cafe Bazaar and Myket captures, all read 28 September 2026, with the preceding capture of 21 September used for every week-on-week figure. Store download figures are each store’s own published estimate and are never summed across platforms. tehranindex.com
Frequently asked
There is no single answer, and that is the finding rather than a dodge. Tehran Index captured sixteen companies on both Cafe Bazaar and Sib App on 28 September 2026. The iOS download figure ranges from 0.09 percent of the Android figure for Basalam to 12.90 percent for Exir, with a median of 1.42 percent. Across the ten pairs whose iOS figure is 10,000 or more, where the store’s rounding is at most about 5 percent of the value, the range is 0.09 to 5.20 percent with a median of 1.54 percent. The share is a property of the individual app rather than of the country, so an Android figure cannot be scaled up by any fixed correction. These are downloads published by each store, not devices and not people, and figures from the two platforms are never added together.
Iranian apps are distributed to iOS through domestic catalogues, and Sib App is one of them. It publishes 3,251 listings as at 28 September 2026 with a download figure against each, rounded to one or two significant digits rather than exact. Sibche runs a second catalogue whose app carries an exact download integer, and Anardoni and Charkhoneh exist without a measured surface in the Tehran Index App Index so far. Because the builds are re-signed for domestic distribution, the bundle identifier on an iOS listing is a signing artefact and not an identity: Divar ships under an identifier belonging to a studio, which is why Tehran Index matches listings to companies on the website domain the listing itself publishes.
You can take the ratio and you cannot take the sum. Cafe Bazaar and Myket publish a band, Sib App publishes a rounded integer, and Tehran Index treats them as three different instruments: no union, total or average crosses a platform, and the App Index enforces that in code rather than by convention. Comparing the same company against itself on two stores on the same day is legitimate, which is what the table in this piece does. Adding a company’s iOS figure to its Android figure to get a market size is not, because nothing establishes that the two count the same event or exclude the same person.
Of the sixteen companies measured on both platforms on 28 September 2026, the highest shares after the smallest pairs are set aside are Alibaba.ir at 5.20 percent of its Cafe Bazaar figure, Tapsi at 4.97 percent, Digikala at 3.38 percent and Filimo at 2.34 percent. The lowest are Basalam at 0.09 percent, OmpFinex at 0.25 percent, MyWallet at 0.57 percent and Divar at 0.70 percent. The apparent pattern is that companies selling a considered purchase skew higher than free mass-reach utilities, but Tehran Index has measured no handset prices, incomes or basket sizes and does not present that as a cause. The crypto exchanges in the set occupy the whole range, from 12.90 percent down to 0.25 percent.
It looks that way and it is an artefact. Across the sixteen paired companies the Sib App rating is higher than the Cafe Bazaar rating on eleven, with a mean gap of plus 0.736 of a star. Twenty of the 59 matched Sib App listings carry five or fewer ratings and thirteen of those twenty show exactly 5.00, which is what a handful of ratings does to an average. Require a hundred ratings before a listing counts and the set falls to eight pairs, the iOS score is higher on three of them, and the mean gap collapses to plus 0.011 of a star. The rating field on this store is not usable at the small end, and Tehran Index publishes the 0.736 only so that nobody else publishes it as a finding.
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