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.
... continue reading