Last summer, Bria Sullivan was preparing to launch her app, an adorable companion called Focus Friend, designed to help people manage their screen time. Her special dream was to get 100,000 downloads. She was making the app with Hank Green, a creator with a large audience, so she thought maybe, maybe, Focus Friend could be a top 10 productivity app. However, even that felt like a stretch. “Our category has ChatGPT, Google has it,” he says. “I think productivity includes Gmail!”
Sullivan first dropped the app on the iOS App Store without telling anyone. But in August, thanks to a lot of promotion from Green and his also-famous brother, plus a ton of media coverage (including from The Verge), the application started to run. He got into the top 10 in his category. Then the top 10 in the overall ranking. When he reached the No. 4 spot, Green told Sullivan he wanted to reach No. 1. “I was like, ‘That’s not happening,'” Sullivan says. “But congratulations for thinking it was possible.
It kept rising. On August 18, Sullivan went to sleep with Focus Friend at #2 on the leaderboard. “I was probably waking up every hour and still refreshing myself,” she says. And then it happened: On August 19, Focus Friend became the most popular free app in the United States, topping both the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store. (Sullivan, like almost every other developer, cares a lot more about iOS.) Her developer friends sent congratulatory texts; Green and his also-famous brother made videos about the rise of the app. “I’ve been making apps since 2010,” she says, “and I didn’t even think to dream so high. It was like a dream I didn’t even know I could dream.”
Then the trade freshened up again and it was all over. ChatGPT was the most popular app in the store for the previous 22 days and took its place back for the next 23 days. Focus Friend’s sanity-saving little bean was the biggest thing in mobile software all day.
However, one day still counts. Focus Friend is the “#1 app in the App Store” forever. That fact is now in big letters at the top of the Focus Friend website, and Sullivan has spent the intervening months trying to find subtle ways to bring it up in casual conversation. She has a lot of screenshots of the App Store charts from that day—she’s thinking maybe she should print one out on a big poster 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 base, or even your long-term viability as a business. It’s being able to tell people you were number one.
I started thinking about life at the top of the App Store when OpenAI’s Sora app launched in October. The app immediately shot to the top of the charts and stayed there for the next 20 days. Sora was obviously a hit, but no one I knew used it. So how big was Sora really? What does it actually take to reach #1 and what does it mean to get there?
At least in theory, the numbers seem huge. Apple recently said that 850 million people use the store every week, and that developers have made more than $550 billion on the platform since the store opened in 2008. In 2024, there were a total of 1,961,596 apps available on the store — if you can be the biggest of them all, that could be a huge uptick.
As of 2012, only 568 different apps are #1 in the free section of the US iOS App Store, according to data from market intelligence company Sensor Tower. (That’s less than two-hundredths of a percent of all apps in the store.) Temu, the long-viral cheap shopping app, spent there longer than any other app, with 399 days in the top slot. Seven others — Facebook Messenger, ChatGPT, YouTube, TikTok, Zoom Workplace, Bitmoji and Threads — spent at least 100 days at the top of the list. These eight apps are actually twice the Mount Rushmore of the App Store, and with the possible exception of Bitmoji, none of them are terribly surprising.
(By the way, paid listing is a radically different beast: Minecraft is the most popular paid app on iOS for 3,289 days – another most popular social game Cheer uponly 283. In third place: WhatsApp, which since 2013 is not even a paid application. These rankings don’t change much.)
The next level of App Store size is largely reserved for two kinds of apps. There are apps that were very popular but only for a short time, like BeReal (67 days at #1) and Draw something (38 days) and there are perennially popular utility apps like Google Maps (29 days) and iTunes U (50 days). Mostly these are games – hundreds and hundreds. Games you remember and might still play, as well as games like it Egg punch and 100 balls and Weed Firm: RePlanted and The legend of mushrooms. It has long been true that people generally don’t like to download apps, but of course they do download games.
Virtually every app that makes it to the top of the list — a full 478 of the 568 on the list — has a short run of 10 days or less. 292 apps stayed at the top for three days or less, and 130 of them were number one for only one day. One-day wonders in particular offer something of a complete cross-section of the App Store. Taco Bell and Jimmy John’s both had their day. So are Netflix and Yahoo Mail, various scanner and printer apps, Planet Fitness, the ill-fated MrBeast hamburger business, Bath & Body Works, and dozens more.
When I asked Sullivan how many downloads it took to reach the top, she said she estimated that 200,000 downloads per day would almost always get you there. Other developers I spoke to seemed to agree with the rough estimate, or maybe a bit higher. But one thing I’ve heard over and over again is that App Store ratings are something of a mystery. The rating seems to update several times a day and seems to take into account the last 24 hours of downloads. Downloads and chart positions seem correlated – no one I’ve spoken to is accusing Apple of tipping the scales or manipulating the charts in any way.
It appears that your best shot at reaching #1 in the App Store is right after launch. Your next best shot seems to be offering free stuff in exchange for app downloads like Taco Bell, Chick-fil-A, McDonald’s, Jimmy John’s, and Krispy Kreme. Otherwise, you need some kind of massive cultural event to catapult you up the charts: Peacock, for example, has eight separate stints at #1, almost all on days when the streamer aired a big NFL game, World Cup or Olympics. The New York City Marathon app reached #1 in 2024 on the day of the New York City Marathon. The Smithsonian Solar Eclipse 2017 app, well, you can probably guess. More recently, TikTok’s change in ownership (and the app’s subsequent failures) briefly sent rival social network UpScrolled to #1.
Cesar Kuriyama, CEO of an app called 1 Second Everyday, found his cultural event almost by accident. You’ve probably seen the video from his app, which encourages people to take one-second videos every day and then combine them into a year-long timelapse. The app launched in 2013, and “in our entire first year, we didn’t get much attention on the App Store,” says Kuriyama. “Then all of a sudden, on New Year’s, we were like, hey, look, we’re going up. People shared their year-long time-lapses, creating a viral moment for the app – people saw the videos, downloaded the app, and started creating their own. 1 Second in a Thousand Every day on Dec. 31 and Jan. 1, it routinely gets hundreds of downloads, Kuriyama says, putting it at the top of the App Store.
I’ve come to think of “No. 1 in the App Store” as roughly the equivalent of “New York Times bestselling author’ or ‘Oscar-nominated actress’. There is no exact correlation between these accolades and any kind of business longevity, but it is a widely understood imprimatur of success. It becomes the top line of your summary, the first shot on the field, a fact that no one can take away from you regardless of the details in the dollars and hundreds. Several developers have told me that the #1 hit is instantly facilitating meetings with potential partners and developing new projects.
“You see Slack messages exploding, you see your phone buzzing with messages and phone calls,” says Ben Moore, CEO of BeReal. “Screenshots are being shared on WhatsApp, on Telegram. Maybe some investors are texting you, like, ‘What the hell is going on?'” But he says the phenomenon is more like a jab than a switch being flipped. “Yes, it’s a moment—but it’s not really a goal.
Moore describes reaching the top of the App Store as something like going viral on social media. It happens quickly, almost always without warning, and suddenly you feel like the whole world is watching you. It’s hard not to be drunk. And then all those new people paying attention to you… stop. “You end up attracting users who didn’t necessarily come because of the core value of your app,” he says. “You have people who install the app, play with it for a day, two days, and then … they move on.” He says he learned to stay disciplined and grow the app one user at a time rather than chasing the next one.
That virality also has other costs. A spike in downloads can strain infrastructure and force companies to look for additional servers or additional customer support that may not even be needed in a few days. A #1 strike can amplify the trend, but it also gives more reasons to ride it. “We’ve seen a surge in downloads, a flurry of press (including some controversial footage), and a lot of copycats,” says Alex Chernoburov, chief product officer at Ticket to the Moon.
One of Ticket to the Moon’s photo-editing apps, Gradient, added a feature in 2019 that claimed to tell users what celebrities looked like. She rose to the top of the App Store when several Kardashians and other celebrities started posting about her, and was immediately hit with backlash over the app’s price and some problematic choices like that. 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. Chernoburov says he thinks the pros outweigh the cons, but like Moore and BeReal, he also says the real challenge isn’t chasing virality, but building lasting products and customers.
Finally, here’s a shocking conclusion: if you create an app, you should want it to reach #1 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, new viral phenomena that you can’t even predict.
But it doesn’t matter. All you need is a day. Screenshot. Text messages, Slacks, enthusiastic investors and partners and friends. A new website header that you can write. Because once you’re the #1 app, you’ll always be the #1 app.