Last summer, Bria Sullivan was getting ready to launch her app, a cute companion called FocusFriend, aimed at helping people manage their screen time. His foreign dream was to get 100,000 downloads. She was making the app with Hank Green, a creator with a huge audience, so she thought maybe, perhaps, Focus Friend might be a top 10 app in the productivity category. Even this felt like a stretch, though. “Our category has ChatGPT, it has Google,” she says. “I mean, productivity includes Gmail!”
Sullivan initially released the app into the iOS App Store without telling anyone. But in August, a bunch of media coverage (including a lot of promotion from Green and his famous brother the edge), the app began to take off. He placed in the top 10 in his category. Then top 10 on the overall charts. When it came to the #4 spot, Green told Sullivan he wanted to get to number one. “I was like, ‘That’s not happening,'” says Sullivan. “But congratulations on thinking that.”
It went up. On August 18, Sullivan peaked at #2 on the charts with Focus’s Go to Bed with Friend. “I was probably awake every hour, just refreshed,” 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 every other developer, cares deeply about iOS.) His developer friends sent congratulatory messages. Both Green and his famous brother made videos about the app’s rise. “I’ve been building apps since 2010,” she says, “and I never thought to dream so high. It was a dream I didn’t even know I could achieve.”
Then the store refreshed again, and it was over. ChatGPT had been the most popular app in the store for the past 22 days and regained its position for the next 23 days. Focus Friend’s little centi-saving bean was the biggest thing in mobile software for a day.
A day still counts, though. Focus Friend is forever the “#1” app in the App Store. That fact is now in big letters at the top of Focus Friend’s website, and Sullivan has spent the intervening months trying to find subtle ways to bring it up in casual conversation. She has tons of screenshots of that day’s App Store charts—she’s thinking maybe she should print them out on a giant poster board and hang them behind her on 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 business. It’s worth telling people you were number one.
I started thinking about life on the App Store when OpenAI’s Sora app launched in October. The app immediately rose to the top of the rankings and remained 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 get to #1, and what does it mean once you get there?
In theory, at least, the numbers seem huge. Apple recently said that 850 million people use the Store each week and that developers have made more than $550 billion on the platform since the Store opened in 2008. As of 2024, there were a total of 1,961,596 apps available in the Store — if you can be the biggest of them all, the upside can be huge.
Since 2012, only 568 different apps have been #1 in the free section of the US iOS app store, according to data from market intelligence firm SensorTower. (That’s less than two-hundredths of one percent of all apps in the Store.) Temu, the long-viral affordable shopping app, has spent more time 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 at the top of the list. Those eight apps are effectively the double-wide Mount Rushmore of the App Store, and with the possible exception of Bitmoji, none are terribly surprising.
(The paid list is an entirely different animal, by the way: Minecraft Has been the most popular paid app on iOS for 3,289 days – next most popular, Party Game Heads upOnly 283. In third place: WhatsApp, which hasn’t even been a paid app since 2013. These charts do not 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 for a short time, like BeReal (67 days at #1) and draw something (38 days), and 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 can still play and games like this Egg punch And 100 balls And Weed Firm: Replanting And The Legend of Mushrooms. It’s been a truism for a long time that people generally don’t like to download apps, but obviously they will download games.
For virtually every app that tops the chart — a full 478 of the 568 on the list — the run is short, 10 days or less. 292 apps stayed at the top for three days or less, and 130 of them were number one for just one day. 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 are 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 top, he said he figured 200,000 downloads a day would get you there. Other developers I spoke to seemed to agree to some extent, or perhaps even more so. But one thing I’ve heard over and over again is that App Store rankings are a mystery. The rankings seem to refresh a few times a day and seem to take 24 hours of downloads into account. Downloads and chart positions seem to be correlated—no one I’ve spoken to has accused Apple of thumbing the scale or manipulating the charts in any way.
Your best shot to reach #1 in the App Store is right after launch. Your Next Best Shot seems to offer freebies in exchange for app downloads, like Taco Bell, Chick-fil-A, McDonald’s, Jimmy John’s, and Krispy Kreme all have. Otherwise, you need a big cultural program to get you up the chart: Peacock, for example, has had eight separate stints at #1, almost all on days when the streamer was broadcasting either a big NFL game, the World Cup, or the Olympics. The New York City Marathon app targets day #1 of the 2024 New York City Marathon. The Smithsonian Solar Eclipse 2017 app, well, you can probably guess it. More recently, TikTok’s change in ownership (and the app’s subsequent failures) sent a rival social network, UpScrolled, briefly to #1.
Cesar Kuriyama, 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 stitch them into a year-long time-lapse. The app launched in 2013, and “for 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 Day, we were like, hey look, we’re growing the ranks.” People were sharing their time-lapses throughout the year, creating a viral moment for the app — people watched the videos, downloaded the app, and started making their own. 1 Second routinely gets hundreds of thousands of downloads a day on December 31 and January 1, Kuriyama says, which puts it near the top of the App Store.
I’ve come to think of “#1 on the App Store” as roughly equivalent to “The New York Times “Best-selling author” or “Oscar-nominated actress.” There’s no exact correlation between these accolades and any kind of business longevity, but it’s a universally-understood sign of success. It becomes the top line of your resume, the first slide of the pitch deck, the fact that no one can take away the dollar-and-cent details from you. Several developers have told me that hitting #1 immediately leads to meeting potential partners and landing new projects. It became easy.
“You see Slack messages exploding, you see your phone buzzing with messages and phone calls,” says Ben Moore, managing director of BeReal. “Screenshots are being shared on WhatsApp, on Telegram. You might get some investors texting you, like, ‘What’s going on?'” But he says the trend is more like an acceleration than the flip of a switch. “Yes, it’s a moment – but it’s not really a destination.”
Moore describes hitting the top of the App Store as going viral on social media. It happens quickly, almost always without warning, and suddenly it feels like the whole world is watching you. It’s hard not to get addicted. And then all those new people who are paying attention to you… stop. “You attract users who wouldn’t necessarily come 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 hover.” He says he’s learned to be disciplined, growing the app one user at a time rather than chasing another spike.
This virality has other costs. An increase in downloads can strain infrastructure, requiring companies to add more servers or more customer support help that may not be needed in a few days. Hitting No. 1 can boost a trend, but also gives others reasons to hijack it. “We saw an increase in downloads, a flurry of press coverage (including some controversial leaks) and a fair amount of copycats,” says Alex Chernoborov, chief product officer at Ticket to the Moon.
Gradient, one of Ticket to the Moon’s photo-editing apps, shipped a feature in 2019 that claimed to tell users what celebrity they looked like. It shot to the top of the App Store after several Kardashians and other celebrities started posting about it and was immediately hit with backlash over the app’s price and some seemingly problematic choices. Then came the clones, named My Replica and Look Like You? Celebrity!, some of which were so fraudulent that they were removed from the App Store. Chernoborov says he thinks the upside outweighs the downside, but like Moore and Beryl, he also says the real task is not chasing virality but building long-lasting products and customers.
Ultimately, the surprising takeaway is this: If you build an app, you want it to reach #1 on the App Store. It won’t change your life immediately, 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 begin to predict.
But it doesn’t matter. All you need is one day. Screenshot. Text messages, slacks, enthusiastic investors and partners and friends. The new website header you get to write. Because once you’re the #1 app, you’re always the #1 app.
