App Store Seasonality: When the Charts Move and Why

App charts have a calendar: Christmas morning is the single biggest install day of the year, New Year's Day is the App Store's biggest spending day, and a handful of categories, from fitness to tax to shopping, take turns owning the top 20 for a few weeks. If you know the dates, you can read a rank jump correctly and time your own launches and events around the people who are already looking.

The seasonal map

Christmas week: the new-device tide

The mechanism is simple: people unwrap phones and tablets, sign in, and install. Flurry's long-running measurement found that Christmas Day 2012 saw more than 17.4 million iOS and Android activations against an early-December baseline of around 4 million a day, a 332% jump, and app downloads ran about 2.1 times the baseline ¹. The absolute numbers are old, but the shape has repeated every year since.

Apple's own figures track the money side. Customers spent $890 million in the week from Christmas Eve 2017 and a record $300 million on New Year's Day 2018 ²; $1.22 billion in the same week a year later ³; $386 million on New Year's Day 2020 ⁴; and $1.8 billion between Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve 2020 followed by $540 million on New Year's Day 2021, the last time Apple broke the figure out ⁵. Sensor Tower estimated $277 million of combined App Store and Google Play spending on Christmas Day 2019 alone, up 11.5% on 2018 ⁶.

For the charts, this means two things. First, the ranking inputs for every app are inflated at once, so staying still in rank during Christmas week means you grew with the tide. Second, apps that are default installs on a new phone (messaging, streaming, the big games) climb hardest, and smaller apps that were number 40 in a category can drop 20 places without losing a single download.

New Year: the resolution categories

The handover from gifting to self-improvement happens within 48 hours. Sensor Tower's Health & Fitness report put January 2025 downloads at their highest since January 2022 and January 2025 in-app revenue at a record $385 million, up 10% year over year, and attributes the start-of-year surge to resolutions ⁷. The same pattern applies to meditation, habit trackers, budgeting and language learning: people buy the annual plan in the first week of January, which is why those categories' top grossing charts move more than their top free charts.

The window closes fast. By late January the resolution cohort is churning, and the apps that climbed into the overall top 50 slide back out during February. If you run a fitness or habit app, a trial offer that starts on 26 December and a Major Update event timed for 1 January catch both sides of the peak.

Ramadan: a regional chart you will not see from the US

Ramadan moves about 11 days earlier each year and lasts a month, so it is the one seasonal event you must look up rather than memorise. AppsFlyer's 2025 analysis of 220 million installs in five MENA markets found sessions up about 15% year over year during the month, in-app purchase revenue up 18.6% to $1.70 billion, and shopping non-organic installs up 76% across the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, front-loaded into the first half of the month ⁸. Its 2024 report found Middle East non-organic installs up 27% versus the weeks before Ramadan ⁹. Sensor Tower and Bidease report OTT downloads rising 20% in Ramadan 2024, 35% in 2025 and 48% in 2026, while total time spent in 2026 fell despite the record installs ¹⁰.

Gaming is the exception: AppsFlyer found gaming sessions flat and installs slightly down in 2025 ⁸. Expect Quran, prayer-time and streaming apps to dominate the Saudi, Egyptian, Indonesian and Malaysian free charts for the month and then vanish.

Tax season: the sharpest single drop of the year

US tax apps are the clearest case of a deadline-driven chart. In 2026 TurboTax recorded close to 272,000 daily downloads on 15 April, then lost around 90% of that volume within 72 hours and fell from number 2 to number 192 in the overall US App Store chart by 18 April ¹³. The climb is slower: tax apps enter the top 100 as W-2s arrive in late January, step up in early February, and peak in the final week before the deadline.

Back-to-school and Black Friday

Education apps climb from mid-August through the second week of September as US and European terms begin. We could not find a public, dated percentage for the back-to-school lift, so treat its size as unconfirmed; its timing, however, is visible every year in the Education category charts.

Black Friday is the shopping category's Christmas. Airship measured e-commerce app downloads on Black Friday 2023 at 81% above the daily holiday-season average, with Temu, Walmart, Shopify's Shop, Amazon and Shein leading the US App Store ¹². Appfigures found US shopping downloads on Black Friday 2025 up 8.2% year over year on the App Store but down 2.2% on Google Play, with Temu, Walmart, Shop, Whatnot and Etsy among the top ten ¹¹. The two stores diverged, which is a reminder that Play's shopping chart is driven more by pre-installed and retailer apps than iOS's.

How this shows up in the charts

Every one of these effects is visible in our history. Open the chart archive and set the date to 25 December or 1 January of any year we cover, then compare with 10 December: you will see casual games and messaging apps packed into the top 20, and utilities and niche apps pushed down without having lost downloads. The US iOS movers page is the fastest way to catch a deadline effect in the wild; TurboTax and H&R Block appear among the biggest fallers in the days after 15 April, and Temu and Walmart among the biggest climbers in Thanksgiving week. For Ramadan, switch to the Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Indonesia country pages on the iOS charts and Android charts rather than the US. The rules that turn those download swings into rank swings are covered in how rankings work.

Caveats

Flurry's activation multiples are from 2012 and are used here for the shape of the spike, not its current size; nobody publishes a comparable cross-platform daily number today. Apple stopped reporting New Year's Day spending after January 2021. The back-to-school lift has timing evidence in category charts but no public, dated percentage we could verify unconfirmed. Ramadan figures are MENA-only and mostly year over year rather than versus the preceding weeks.