Top apps ranking

Both stores publish ranked lists of apps for every country they operate in: the top free, the top paid and the top grossing, overall and for each category. They are the most visible shelf of the store, and for anyone working on a mobile app they are also the only public, daily view of who is winning a market.

The top free and top paid charts rank apps by recent downloads, with more weight on the last hours and days than on an app's lifetime total. The top grossing chart ranks them by the money they earn in the store: paid downloads, in-app purchases and subscriptions, before the store's commission. Neither Apple nor Google publishes the numbers behind a rank, only the order.

Charts are computed per storefront. The US top free has nothing to do with the French one, and an app can be in the top 10 of its category while ranking past 150 overall. That is why this tool lets you pick the store, the country, the chart and the category: each combination is its own market snapshot.

Download velocity is the main input of the free and paid charts. A spike of installs over a day or two, from a feature by the store, a viral video or a paid campaign, moves an app up fast, and the rank falls back just as fast when the spike ends. Steady, organic growth keeps it there.

The stores also filter what they count. Apple and Google discard installs they consider artificial, and both are believed to weigh signals such as retention, uninstalls and ratings to keep low-quality apps out of the charts. Grossing ranks follow revenue only, so they are much more stable: a subscription app with a loyal base can hold its grossing rank for years.

In practice, what moves an app up a chart is what grows its real audience: store optimization that converts more of its page visitors, user acquisition, seasonality (fitness in January, travel before summer) and product updates that bring people back.

• Free and paid charts: downloads of the last days, weighted towards the most recent.
• Grossing chart: the gross revenue earned in the store over a recent window.
• Category charts: the same signals, limited to the apps of that category.

Volume falls steeply as rank grows, following a power law: the #1 free app in the US gets well over a hundred thousand downloads a day, the #100 somewhere near ten thousand, the #200 a few thousand. The same shape holds for revenue: millions of dollars a day at the very top of the US grossing chart, tens of thousands around #100. appwin fits that curve on public reference points, scales it for each country with the size of its market, and reads every app's estimate from its rank of the day.

Downloads come from an app's rank in the top free, revenue from its rank in the top grossing of the same day. The grossing chart only goes 100 deep: for an app outside it, revenue is estimated from its downloads times a typical store revenue per download for its category (high for games, dating and AI or productivity subscriptions, near zero for marketplaces, social networks and banks, which do not bill through the store), and always kept below the #100 of the grossing chart. That second estimate is rougher, and marked as such. On a category chart, the overall rank is used when the app has one, and a category factor otherwise.

These are estimates, rounded to two significant figures on purpose. Expect the right order of magnitude rather than an exact number: a factor of two either way is common for a single app, more for small markets and category charts. They are reliable for comparing apps with one another and following a market over time, not for valuing a company. The model and its sources are documented, and the figures are recomputed every day.

A category chart read every day tells you who leads a market, how crowded it is and how fast newcomers climb. Comparing the free and grossing charts of a category shows whether it monetizes: categories where the same apps sit at the top of both are the ones where downloads turn into revenue.

For competitor tracking, watch the rank changes rather than the ranks themselves. A competitor climbing thirty places in a week is usually running a campaign, has been featured or shipped something that works, and its store page and ads are worth a look that same week.

• Size a niche: add up the estimated revenue of the top grossing apps of its category.
• Spot rising apps: sort the moves of the day and look at what the climbers changed.
• Compare countries: the same category can be crowded in the US and wide open elsewhere.
• Check monetization: an app high in free downloads but absent from grossing has not found its model yet.

Google Play brings more downloads in most of the world, the App Store more revenue in most rich markets. In the US the two stores are close on downloads, while iPhone users spend roughly twice as much; in India, Brazil or Mexico, Google Play installs dwarf the App Store's. The estimates use one curve per store and per country to reflect that.

The two stores do not rank the same way either. Category lists differ, Google Play charts are more stable from one day to the next, and the App Store reacts faster to a short burst of downloads. Compare an app across stores with its rank in each, not with one store's chart alone.

This page shows estimates because the real numbers of other people's apps are private. For your own apps, appwin reads the real ones: the revenue and subscriptions of App Store Connect and Google Play, the downloads and the store analytics, next to the chart ranks and keyword positions captured every day.

The same workspace runs support, community, push notifications, analytics, attribution and ASO, plugged into your apps through one SDK. A free account lets you track your apps and their competitors' ranks from the first day, with no credit card.