The biggest app in the whole wide world

Last summer, Bria Sullivan was getting ready to launch her app, an adorable companion called Focus Friend meant to help people manage their screen time. Her outlandish dream was to get 100,000 downloads. She’d been building the app with Hank Green, a creator with a huge audience, so she thought maybe, maybe, Focus Friend could be a top-10 app in the productivity category. Even that felt like a stretch, though. “Our category has ChatGPT, it has Google,” she says. “I mean, productivity includes Gmail!”

Sullivan initially dropped the app into the iOS App Store without really telling anyone. But in August, thanks to a lot of promotion from Green and his also-famous brother, plus a bunch of media coverage (including from The Verge), the app started to take off. It hit the top 10 in its category. Then top 10 on the overall charts. When it hit the #4 spot, Green told Sullivan he wanted to reach number one. “I was like, ‘That’s not happening,’” Sullivan says. “But congrats for thinking that’s possible.”

It continued to climb. On August 18th, Sullivan went to bed with Focus Friend at #2 on the charts. “I probably woke up every hour, and just kept refreshing,” she says. And then it happened: on August 19th, Focus Friend became the most popular free app in the United States, at the top of both the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store. (Sullivan, like pretty much every other developer, cares a lot more about iOS.) Her developer friends sent congratulatory texts; Green and his also-famous brother both made videos about the app’s rise. “I’ve been making apps since 2010,” she says, “and I didn’t even think to dream that high. It was like, a dream I didn’t even know I could dream came true.”

Then the store refreshed again, and it was over. ChatGPT had been the store’s most popular app for the 22 previous days and took its spot back for the following 23. Focus Friend’s tiny little sanity-saving bean was the biggest thing in mobile software for a grand total of one day.

One day still counts, though. Focus Friend is forever a “#1 in the App Store” app. That fact now sits in large letters at the top of the Focus Friend website, and Sullivan has spent the interim months trying to find subtle ways to bring it up in casual conversation. She has many screenshots of the App Store charts from that day — she’s thinking maybe she should print one on huge posterboard and hang it behind her on video calls. Because it turns out that the very best thing about being #1 in the App Store is not what it means for your user numbers, or even your long-term viability as a business. It’s being able to tell people you were number one.

I started wondering about life atop the App Store when OpenAI’s Sora app launched in October. The app immediately shot to the top of the rankings and stayed there for the next 20 days. Sora was obviously a hit, but no one I knew was using it. So how big was Sora, really? What does it actually take to reach #1, and what does it mean once you get there?

In theory, at least, the numbers seem huge. Apple 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 2024, there were 1,961,596 total apps available in the store — if you can be the biggest of them all, the upside might be enormous.

Since 2012, according to data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, only 568 different apps have been #1 in the US iOS App Store’s free section. (That is less than two one-hundredths of a percent of all the apps in the store.) Temu, the long-viral cheap shopping app, has spent longer there than any other app, with 399 days in the top slot. Seven others — Facebook Messenger, ChatGPT, YouTube, TikTok, Zoom Workplace, Bitmoji, and Threads — have spent at least 100 days apiece at the top of the list. Those eight apps are effectively the App Store’s double-wide Mount Rushmore, and with the possible exception of Bitmoji, none are terribly surprising.

(The paid list is a radically different beast, by the way: Minecraft has been the most popular paid app on iOS for 3,289 days — the next most popular, the party game Heads Up, only 283. 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 kinds of apps. There are the apps that were hugely popular but only for a brief time, like BeReal (67 days at #1) and Draw Something (38 days), and there are the consistently 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 might still play and also games like Egg Punch and 100 Balls and Weed Firm: RePlanted and Legend of Mushroom. It has long been a truism that people generally don’t like downloading apps, but evidently they’ll download games.

For virtually every app that hits the top of the charts — a full 478 of the 568 on the list — the run is short, 10 days or fewer. 292 apps lasted three days or fewer at the top, and 130 of those were number one for just one day. The one-day wonders in particular offer something like a complete cross-section of the App Store. Taco Bell and Jimmy John’s both had their day. So did Netflix and 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 took to reach the summit, she said she figured 200,000 downloads in a day will almost always get you there. Other developers I talked to seemed to agree with the rough estimate, or maybe a smidge higher. But one thing I heard over and over is that App Store rankings are something of a mystery. The rankings seem to refresh a few times a day and seem to take into account the trailing 24 hours of downloads. Downloads and chart positions seem correlated — nobody I spoke to accused Apple of putting its thumb on the scale or manipulating the charts in any way.

Your best shot at hitting #1 in the App Store appears to be right after launch. Your next best shot appears to be offering free stuff in exchange for app downloads, like Taco Bell, Chick-fil-A, McDonald’s, Jimmy John’s, and Krispy Kreme all have. Otherwise, you need some kind of massive cultural event to catapult you up the charts: Peacock, for instance, has had eight separate stints at #1, nearly all of them on days the streamer was either airing a big NFL game, the World Cup, or the Olympics. The New York City Marathon app hit #1 in 2024 on the day of the New York City Marathon. The Smithsonian Solar Eclipse 2017 app, well, you can probably guess that one. Most recently, the change in TikTok’s ownership (and the app’s subsequent failures) sent a rival social network, UpScrolled, briefly to #1.

Cesar Kuriyama, the CEO of an app called 1 Second Everyday, found his cultural event almost by accident. You’ve probably seen a video from his app, which encourages people to take one-second videos every day and then stitches them into a yearlong timelapse. The app launched in 2013, and “our entire first year, we didn’t get a lot of attention on the App Store,” Kuriyama says. “Then, all of a sudden, on New Year’s Day, we were like, hey look, we’re rising up the ranks.” People were sharing their yearlong timelapses, creating a viral moment for the app — people saw the videos, downloaded the app, and started making their own. 1 Second Everyday routinely gets hundreds of thousands of downloads on December 31st and January 1st, Kuriyama says, which lands it near the top of the App Store.

I’ve come to think of “#1 on the App Store” as roughly the equivalent of “New York Times bestselling author” or “Oscar-nominated actress.” There’s no exact correlation between those accolades and any kind of business longevity, but it is a universally understood imprimatur of success. It becomes the top line on your résumé, the first slide in the pitch deck, a fact nobody can take away from you no matter the dollars-and-cents details. Multiple developers told me that hitting #1 immediately made it easier to get meetings with potential partners and spin up new projects.

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

Moore describes hitting the top of the App Store as sort of like going viral on social media. It happens fast, almost always without warning, and it suddenly feels like the whole world is looking at you. It’s hard not to be intoxicated. And then all those new people paying attention to you… stop. “You end up attracting users that didn’t necessarily come for the core value of your app,” he says. “You have people installing the app, playing with it for one day, two days, and then… they churn.” He says he’s learned to stay disciplined, growing the app one user at a time rather than chasing another spike.

That virality has other costs, too. A surge in downloads can strain infrastructure, forcing companies to shell out for more servers or more customer support help that may not even be needed in a couple of days. Hitting #1 can amplify a trend, but also gives others reasons to hijack it. “We saw a surge in downloads, a wave of press coverage (including some controversial takes), and plenty of copycats,” says Alex Chernoburov, the 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 celebrity they looked like. It hit the top of the App Store when multiple Kardashians and other celebs started posting about it and was immediately hit by backlash to the app’s price and some problematic look-alike choices. Then came the clones, with names like My Replica and Look Like You? Celebrity!, some of which were so blatantly scammy they were removed from the App Store. Chernoburov says he thinks the upsides outweigh the downsides, but like Moore and BeReal, he also says the real job is to not chase virality but build lasting products and customers.

Ultimately, here’s the shocking takeaway: if you make an app, you should want it to hit #1 on the App Store. It won’t immediately change your life, and continually chasing downloads at all costs is a waste of time and energy. There will always be other apps, other companies with bigger marketing budgets, new viral phenomena you can’t even begin to predict.

But that doesn’t matter. All you need is a day. The screenshot. The text messages, the Slacks, the excited investors and partners and friends. The new website header you get to write. Because once you’re a #1 app, you’re always a #1 app.