Final summer season, Bria Sullivan was on the brink of launch her app, an lovable companion known as Focus Buddy meant to assist individuals handle their display screen time. Her outlandish dream was to get 100,000 downloads. She’d been constructing the app with Hank Inexperienced, a creator with an enormous viewers, so she thought perhaps, perhaps, Focus Buddy might be a top-10 app within the productiveness class. Even that felt like a stretch, although. “Our class has ChatGPT, it has Google,” she says. “I imply, productiveness consists of Gmail!”
Sullivan initially dropped the app into the iOS App Retailer with out actually telling anybody. However in August, because of a number of promotion from Inexperienced and his also-famous brother, plus a bunch of media protection (together with from The Verge), the app began to take off. It hit the highest 10 in its class. Then high 10 on the general charts. When it hit the #4 spot, Inexperienced instructed Sullivan he needed to achieve primary. “I used to be like, ‘That’s not taking place,’” Sullivan says. “However congrats for considering that’s potential.”
It continued to climb. On August 18th, Sullivan went to mattress with Focus Buddy at #2 on the charts. “I in all probability awakened each hour, and simply saved refreshing,” she says. After which it occurred: on August nineteenth, Focus Buddy grew to become the most well-liked free app in the US, on the high of each the iOS App Retailer and the Google Play Retailer. (Sullivan, like just about each different developer, cares much more about iOS.) Her developer mates despatched congratulatory texts; Inexperienced and his also-famous brother each made movies in regards to the app’s rise. “I’ve been making apps since 2010,” she says, “and I didn’t even suppose to dream that top. It was like, a dream I didn’t even know I may dream got here true.”
Then the shop refreshed once more, and it was over. ChatGPT had been the shop’s hottest app for the 22 earlier days and took its spot again for the next 23. Focus Buddy’s tiny little sanity-saving bean was the most important factor in cell software program for a grand whole of at some point.
In the future nonetheless counts, although. Focus Buddy is ceaselessly a “#1 within the App Retailer” app. That reality now sits in massive letters on the high of the Focus Buddy web site, and Sullivan has spent the interim months looking for delicate methods to convey it up in informal dialog. She has many screenshots of the App Retailer charts from that day — she’s considering perhaps she ought to print one on big posterboard and cling it behind her on video calls. As a result of it seems that the perfect factor about being #1 within the App Retailer shouldn’t be what it means to your person numbers, and even your long-term viability as a enterprise. It’s having the ability to inform individuals you have been primary.
I began questioning about life atop the App Retailer when OpenAI’s Sora app launched in October. The app instantly shot to the highest of the rankings and stayed there for the subsequent 20 days. Sora was clearly successful, however nobody I knew was utilizing it. So how huge was Sora, actually? What does it really take to achieve #1, and what does it imply when you get there?
In idea, a minimum of, the numbers appear big. Apple mentioned not too long ago that 850 million individuals use the shop each week and that builders have earned greater than $550 billion on the platform because the retailer opened in 2008. As of 2024, there have been 1,961,596 whole apps obtainable within the retailer — if you happen to may be the most important of all of them, the upside may be monumental.
Since 2012, in response to knowledge from market intelligence agency Sensor Tower, solely 569 completely different apps have been #1 within the US iOS App Retailer’s free part. (That’s lower than two one-hundredths of a p.c of all of the apps within the retailer.) Temu, the long-viral low-cost buying app, has spent longer there than every other app, with 399 days within the high slot. Seven others — Fb Messenger, ChatGPT, YouTube, TikTok, Zoom Office, Bitmoji, and Threads — have spent a minimum of 100 days apiece on the high of the listing. These eight apps are successfully the App Retailer’s double-wide Mount Rushmore, and with the potential exception of Bitmoji, none are terribly stunning.
(The paid listing is a radically completely different beast, by the best way: Minecraft has been the most well-liked paid app on iOS for 3,289 days — the subsequent hottest, the get together sport Heads Up, solely 283. In third place: WhatsApp, which hasn’t even been a paid app since 2013. These charts don’t change a lot.)
The following stage of App Retailer greatness is essentially reserved for 2 sorts of apps. There are the apps that have been massively in style however just for a short time, like BeReal (67 days at #1) and Draw One thing (38 days), and there are the persistently in style utility apps like Google Maps (29 days) and iTunes U (50 days). Principally, there are video games — a whole bunch and a whole bunch of them. Video games you keep in mind and may nonetheless play and likewise video games like Egg Punch and 100 Balls and Weed Agency: RePlanted and Legend of Mushroom. It has lengthy been a truism that individuals usually don’t like downloading apps, however evidently they’ll obtain video games.
For nearly each app that hits the highest of the charts — a full 478 of the 570 on the listing — the run is brief, 10 days or fewer. 292 apps lasted three days or fewer on the high, and 130 of these have been primary for simply at some point. The one-day wonders particularly provide one thing like a whole cross-section of the App Retailer. Taco Bell and Jimmy John’s each had their day. So did Netflix and Yahoo Mail, a number of scanner and printer apps, Planet Health, MrBeast’s ill-fated burger enterprise, Tub & Physique Works, and dozens of others.
After I requested Sullivan what number of downloads it took to achieve the summit, she mentioned she figured 200,000 downloads in a day will nearly at all times get you there. Different builders I talked to appeared to agree with the tough estimate, or perhaps a smidge increased. However one factor I heard time and again is that App Retailer rankings are one thing of a thriller. The rankings appear to refresh a number of occasions a day and appear to keep in mind the trailing 24 hours of downloads. Downloads and chart positions appear correlated — no person I spoke to accused Apple of placing its thumb on the dimensions or manipulating the charts in any means.
Your finest shot at hitting #1 within the App Retailer seems to be proper after launch. Your subsequent finest shot seems to offer free stuff in alternate for app downloads, like Taco Bell, Chick-fil-A, McDonald’s, Jimmy John’s, and Krispy Kreme all have. In any other case, you want some type of large cultural occasion to catapult you up the charts: Peacock, as an example, has had eight separate stints at #1, almost all of them on days the streamer was both airing a giant NFL sport, the World Cup, or the Olympics. The New York Metropolis Marathon app hit #1 in 2024 on the day of the New York Metropolis Marathon. The Smithsonian Photo voltaic Eclipse 2017 app, nicely, you may in all probability guess that one. Most not too long ago, the change in TikTok’s possession (and the app’s subsequent failures) despatched a rival social community, UpScrolled, briefly to #1.
Cesar Kuriyama, the CEO of an app known as 1 Second On a regular basis, discovered his cultural occasion nearly by chance. You’ve in all probability seen a video from his app, which inspires individuals to take one-second movies day by day after which stitches them right into a yearlong timelapse. The app launched in 2013, and “our total first 12 months, we didn’t get a number of consideration on the App Retailer,” Kuriyama says. “Then, unexpectedly, on New Yr’s Day, we have been like, hey look, we’re rising up the ranks.” Individuals have been sharing their yearlong timelapses, making a viral second for the app — individuals noticed the movies, downloaded the app, and began making their very own. 1 Second On a regular basis routinely will get a whole bunch of 1000’s of downloads on December thirty first and January 1st, Kuriyama says, which lands it close to the highest of the App Retailer.
I’ve come to consider “#1 on the App Retailer” as roughly the equal of “New York Instances bestselling writer” or “Oscar-nominated actress.” There’s no precise correlation between these accolades and any type of enterprise longevity, however it’s a universally understood imprimatur of success. It turns into the highest line in your résumé, the primary slide within the pitch deck, a reality no person can take away from you irrespective of the dollars-and-cents particulars. A number of builders instructed me that hitting #1 instantly made it simpler to get conferences with potential companions and spin up new tasks.
“You see Slack messages exploding, you see your telephone buzzing with messages and telephone calls,” says Ben Moore, the managing director of BeReal. “Screenshots are being shared on WhatsApp, on Telegram. You may get some traders texting you, like, ‘what the hell is occurring?’” However he says the phenomenon is extra like a spike than a swap flipping. “Yeah, it’s a second — but it surely’s probably not the vacation spot.”
Moore describes hitting the highest of the App Retailer as type of like going viral on social media. It occurs quick, nearly at all times with out warning, and it abruptly seems like the entire world is you. It’s onerous to not be intoxicated. After which all these new individuals being attentive to you… cease. “You find yourself attracting customers that didn’t essentially come for the core worth of your app,” he says. “You could have individuals putting in the app, taking part in with it for at some point, two days, after which… they churn.” He says he’s realized to remain disciplined, rising the app one person at a time slightly than chasing one other spike.
That virality has different prices, too. A surge in downloads can pressure infrastructure, forcing firms to shell out for extra servers or extra buyer help assist that will not even be wanted in a few days. Hitting #1 can amplify a development, but in addition provides others causes to hijack it. “We noticed a surge in downloads, a wave of press protection (together with some controversial takes), and loads of copycats,” says Alex Chernoburov, the chief product officer at Ticket to the Moon.
Certainly one of Ticket to the Moon’s photo-editing apps, Gradient, shipped a function in 2019 that claimed to inform customers what movie star they regarded like. It hit the highest of the App Retailer when a number of Kardashians and different celebs began posting about it and was instantly hit by backlash to the app’s worth and a few problematic look-alike decisions. Then got here the clones, with names like My Duplicate and Look Like You? Celeb!, a few of which have been so blatantly scammy they have been faraway from the App Retailer. Chernoburov says he thinks the upsides outweigh the downsides, however like Moore and BeReal, he additionally says the true job is to not chase virality however construct lasting merchandise and clients.
In the end, right here’s the surprising takeaway: if you happen to make an app, it’s best to need it to hit #1 on the App Retailer. It gained’t instantly change your life, and frequently chasing downloads in any respect prices is a waste of time and vitality. There’ll at all times be different apps, different firms with larger advertising budgets, new viral phenomena you may’t even start to foretell.
However that doesn’t matter. All you want is a day. The screenshot. The textual content messages, the Slacks, the excited traders and companions and mates. The brand new web site header you get to put in writing. As a result of when you’re a #1 app, you’re at all times a #1 app.
