What’s good about being the most popular app in the world?

Last summer, Bria Sullivan was preparing to launch her app, a cool companion called Focus, friend It aims to help people manage screen time. Her bizarre dream was to get 100,000 downloads. She was designing the app with Hank Green, a content creator with a large audience, so she thought maybe, maybe, Focus Friend could be one of the top 10 apps in the productivity category. Even that seemed like a stretch. “Our class has ChatGPT, and it has Google,” she says. “I mean productivity includes Gmail!”

Sullivan initially dropped the app into the iOS App Store without telling anyone. But in August, thanks to a lot of promotion from Green and his also-famous brother, as well as a host of media coverage (Including from Edge), the application started to boot. It reached the top ten in its category. Then top 10 on the overall charts. When he got to fourth place, Green told Sullivan he wanted to get to first place. “I thought, ‘This isn’t happening,'” Sullivan says. “But congratulations on thinking it’s possible.”

And keep going up. On August 18, Sullivan went to sleep with Focus Friend at number two on the charts. “I was probably getting up every hour, keeping myself fresh,” she says. And then it happened: On August 19, Focus Friend became the most popular free app in the US, at the top of both the iOS App Store and Google Play Store. (Sullivan, like almost every other developer, cares deeply about iOS.) Her developer friends sent congratulatory messages; Both Green and his famous brother have also made videos about the app’s rise. “I’ve been creating apps since 2010, and I never even thought I’d dream this big,” she says. “It was like a dream I didn’t even know I could have came true.”

Then the store picked up again, and that was it. ChatGPT was the most popular app in the store for the previous 22 days and regained its position in the following 23 days. Focus Friend’s tiny little sanity-saving bean was the biggest thing in mobile software for a single day’s total.

However, there is still one important day. Focus Friend is the “#1” app in the App Store forever. This fact now exists in large letters at the top of the Focus Friend website, and Sullivan has spent the tentative months trying to find subtle ways to bring it up in casual conversation. She has several screenshots of App Store charts from that day — and she’s thinking maybe she should print one out on a huge background board and hang it behind her during video calls. Because it turns out that the best thing about being #1 in the App Store isn’t what it means for your user numbers, or even your long-term viability as a company. It’s the ability to tell people that you are number one.

I started wondering about life in the App Store when OpenAI’s Sora app launched in October. The app immediately rose to the top of the rankings and stayed there for the next 20 days. Sora was obviously a big hit, but no one I knew was using it. So, how big was Sora really? What does it actually take to get to number one, and what does it mean once you get there?

In theory, at least, the numbers seem huge. apple He said recently That 850 million people use the store every week and that developers have earned more than $550 billion on the platform since the store opened in 2008. As of 2024There were a total of 1,961,596 apps available in the store – if you could be the biggest of them all, the upside could be huge.

Since 2012, according to data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, only 569 different apps have ranked first in the free section of the US iOS App Store. (That’s less than 2% of all apps in the store.) Temu, the long-running cheap shopping app, spent more time there than any other app, with 399 days at number one. Seven others — Facebook Messenger, ChatGPT, YouTube, TikTok, Zoom Workplace, Bitmoji, and Threads — spent at least 100 days each at the top of the list. These eight apps are actually the App Store’s double-width Mount Rushmore, and with the possible exception of Bitmoji, none of them are too surprising.

(By the way, a paid listing is a whole different beast: Minecraft It was the most popular paid app on iOS for 3,289 days – second in popularity, Party Game attention283 only. In third place: WhatsApp, which hasn’t even been a paid app since 2013. These charts don’t change much.)

The next level of App Store greatness is largely reserved for two types of apps. There are apps that were very popular but only briefly, such as BeReal (67 days in first place) and Draw something (38 days), and there are ever-popular utility apps like Google Maps (29 days) and iTunes U (50 days). Mostly, there are games – hundreds and hundreds of them. Games you remember and still play as well as games similar to them Egg punch and 100 balls and Weed Company: Replant and Mushroom legend. It’s long been axiomatic that people generally don’t like downloading apps, but obviously they will download games.

For nearly every app that reaches the top of the charts — 478 of the 570 on the list — the run is short, 10 days or less. 292 apps lasted three days or less at the top, and 130 of them were in first place for just one day. One-Day Wonders in particular offers what looks like a complete cross-section of the App Store. Taco Bell and Jimmy John’s had their day. So did Netflix, Yahoo Mail, multiple scanner and printer apps, Planet Fitness, MrBeast’s ill-fated burger venture, Bath & Body Works, and dozens of others.

When I asked Sullivan how many downloads it takes to get to the top, she said she believes 200,000 downloads a day will always get you there. Other developers I’ve spoken to seem to agree with the rough estimate, or maybe a little higher. But one thing I’ve heard over and over again is that app store rankings are a mystery. The rating appears to be updated several times a day and appears to take 24 hours of downloads into account. Downloads and chart positions appear to be correlated — no one I spoke to accused Apple of putting its thumb on the scale or manipulating the charts in any way.

It seems like your best chance of hitting the top spot in the App Store comes right after launch. Your next best shot seems to be offering free stuff in exchange for downloading apps, like Taco Bell, Chick-fil-A, McDonald’s, Jimmy John’s, and Krispy Kreme. Otherwise, you need some sort of massive cultural event to propel you to the top of the charts: Peacock, for example, had eight separate stints at No. 1, almost all of them in the days when the streamer was either broadcasting a big NFL game, the World Cup, or the Olympics. New York City Marathon app hit #1 in 2024 on New York City Marathon day. Smithsonian Solar Eclipse 2017, well, you can probably guess that. Recently, a change in TikTok ownership (and the app’s subsequent failure) sent rival social network, UpScrolled, short To number 1.

He called Cesar Kuriyama, the CEO of an app 1 second every dayHe found his cultural event almost by chance. You’ve probably seen a video from his app, which encourages people to record one-second video clips every day and then combine them into a year-long timeline. The app launched in 2013, and “throughout our first year, we didn’t get a lot of attention in the App Store,” Kuriyama says. “Then, all of a sudden, on New Year’s Day, we said, ‘Look, we’re moving up the ranks.’ People were sharing their year-long timelapse, creating a viral moment for the app — people watched the videos, downloaded the app, and started making videos of their own. Kuriyama says the 1 Second Everyday app routinely gets hundreds of thousands of downloads on December 31 and January 1, putting it near the top of the App Store.

I’ve come to think of “#1 in the App Store” as roughly equivalent to “New York Times “Best-selling author” or “Oscar-nominated actress.” There is no exact correlation between these accolades and the longevity of any type of business, but they are a universally understood guarantee of success. This becomes the top line on your resume, the first slide in your presentation, a fact that no one can take away from you regardless of the dollars and cents details. Many developers told me that getting to number one immediately made it easier to hold meetings with potential partners and start new projects.

“You see Slack messages exploding, you see your phone bombarded with messages and phone calls,” says Ben Moore, managing director of BeReal. “Screenshots are being shared on WhatsApp, on Telegram. You might find some investors texting you, like, ‘What the hell is going on?'” But he says the phenomenon is more like a spike than a flip of a switch. “Yes, it’s a moment — but it’s not really the destination.”

Moore describes getting to the top of the App Store as being like going viral on social media. It happens quickly, almost always without warning, and you suddenly feel like the whole world is looking at you. It’s hard not to be drunk. And then all these new people who care about you stop. “You end up attracting users who weren’t necessarily coming for the core value of your app,” he says. “You have people installing the app, playing with it for a day, two days, and then… they throw it away.” He says he’s learned to maintain discipline, developing the app one user at a time rather than chasing another high.

This rapid spread has other costs as well. Increased downloads can strain infrastructure, forcing companies to spend more servers or more customer support help that may not be needed in a couple of days. Pressing 1 can amplify a trend, but it also gives others reasons to hijack it. “We’ve seen a huge increase in downloads, a wave of press coverage (including some controversial clips), and a lot of copycats,” says Alex Chernoborov, chief product officer at Ticket to the Moon.

One of Ticket to the Moon’s photo-editing apps, Gradient, shipped a feature in 2019 that claimed to tell users what celebrities looked like. It reached the top of the App Store when several Kardashians and other celebrities started posting about it and were immediately subjected to backlash over the app’s price and some similarly problematic options. Then came the clones with names like My Replica and Look Like You? Celebrities!, some of which were so blatantly fraudulent that they were removed from the App Store. Chernoborov says he believes the positives outweigh the negatives, but like Moore and BeReal, he also says the real mission is not to chase the spread of the virus, but to build lasting products and customers.

In the end, here’s the shocking takeaway: If you create an app, you should want it to reach number one in the App Store. It won’t change your life instantly, and constantly chasing downloads at all costs is a waste of time and energy. There will always be other apps, other companies with bigger marketing budgets, and new viral phenomena that you can’t even begin to predict.

But that doesn’t matter. All you need is one day. Screenshot. Texting, Slacks, passionate investors, partners and friends. New website header that you can write. Because once you’re the #1 app, you’re always the #1 app.