Methodology
AppWinners records the public top charts of the iOS App Store and Google Play once a day and keeps every snapshot. It shows rankings only, with no download or revenue estimates. The one computed view is the clearly labelled Worldwide chart, built from the country charts.
What is collected
- iOS App Store: 175 storefronts, iPhone charts. Overall Top Free, Top Paid and Top Grossing to 200 positions; 25 category charts (Games, Finance, …) to 100 positions each, free/paid/grossing. Category charts come from Apple's public RSS feeds; overall charts from the App Store's own chart endpoint.
- Google Play: about 195 countries with a distinct chart, phone charts. Top Free, Top Paid and Top Grossing to 200 positions for the overall list and all 53 categories. Google does not publish paid charts for some categories; those are marked absent rather than empty.
When
One snapshot per chart per day, taken at about 06:00 UTC. Each page shows the exact observation time. Apple recalculates its charts several times a day and Google roughly daily, so a daily sample captures the day-to-day picture, not intra-day spikes.
What the columns mean
- 24h: position change versus the previous day's valid snapshot of the same chart. new means the app was not on that chart yesterday.
- Peak and Days: best position and number of days observed on that chart since we began tracking it. History cannot be backfilled; tracking started on 19 October 2026.
- Rank history: one point per day; a gap means the app was not on the chart that day.
Quality checks
Every snapshot must pass sanity checks before it is published: enough charts returned, well-known apps present in the US charts, no duplicate entries, and no implausible overnight churn. A chart that fails is held back and the previous valid data stays visible. The status page shows the freshness of each store.
Fair use and attribution
Chart positions are facts published by the stores. App names, icons, developers and prices are shown as presented by the stores and link back to the official product pages. We hot-link icons from the stores' own servers and do not redistribute them. If you are a developer and want a correction, write to hello@appwinners.eu.
Worldwide charts
Apple and Google publish top charts per country only. Our Worldwide chart is the one thing on AppWinners that is computed rather than observed: it combines every country's chart of the same store, type and category into a single ranking, and it is labelled as an estimate wherever it appears.
- Position score. A position is worth
rank^-α, so #1 counts far more than #10 and #10 far more than #100. Published studies of public chart data find downloads and revenue fall off with rank roughly this way (Garg & Telang, 2013). We use α = 0.62 / 0.944 / 0.86 for App Store Free / Paid / Grossing and 0.62 / 0.985 / 1 for Google Play. Each country's scores are scaled so that a short chart hands out the same total weight as a full one. - Country weight. Each country counts in proportion to its share of the store's worldwide downloads (Top Free) or consumer spending (Top Paid and Top Grossing; Top Paid blends 75% spending with 25% downloads), from public market reports for 2025. App Store spending and both stores' largest download markets are published figures; Google Play spending by country is not published anywhere, so those weights are our estimates from public totals. Countries not listed share a small default weight.
- Ranking. An app's worldwide score is the sum of its weighted position scores across every country. To enter the chart an app must chart in at least 3 countries or in countries holding 2% of the weight, which drops single-market local apps but keeps a US-only or China-only giant. The top 200 scores form the chart; ties go to the app that charts in more countries.
- Missing countries. If a country's chart could not be captured on a given day, its chart from up to 2 days earlier stands in. If countries holding less than 85% of the total weight are available (60% for category charts), or a market that dominates the store (the US and China on the App Store; the US, Japan and South Korea on Google Play) is missing, we skip that day's worldwide chart rather than show a skewed one.
- History. The worldwide chart is stored every day like a country chart, so it has movement, peak rank, days on chart and a history line. It never counts towards an app's “countries charted” or “best rank”, which always describe real store charts.
The heaviest weights in use:
App Store · downloads
- United States23%
- China14%
- Japan4.7%
- Brazil4.5%
- United Kingdom4.1%
- India3.7%
- Russia3.6%
- Germany2.9%
- Vietnam2.8%
- France2.8%
App Store · spending
- United States41%
- China14%
- Japan11%
- United Kingdom4.1%
- Germany2.7%
- Taiwan2.3%
- Canada2.2%
- Australia2.1%
- South Korea1.8%
- France1.6%
Google Play · downloads
- India22%
- Brazil9.4%
- United States7.1%
- Indonesia7.0%
- Mexico4.6%
- Philippines3.2%
- Türkiye3.0%
- Pakistan2.9%
- Egypt2.2%
- Germany2.1%
Google Play · spending
- United States32%
- Japan12%
- South Korea9.5%
- Germany4.0%
- Taiwan3.5%
- United Kingdom3.0%
- India2.0%
- Brazil2.0%
- France2.0%
- Mexico2.0%
Sources: AppTweak, app downloads by country (2024–25); Apple Global Ecosystem Report (2024); TechCrunch on Appfigures 2024 market data; Sensor Tower, 2024 market data; Sensor Tower Q4 2024 Digital Market Index; Sensor Tower on Korean mobile gaming; Sensor Tower on the South Korean market; Garg & Telang, Inferring App Demand from Publicly Available Data (MIS Quarterly, 2013).
Reconstructed archive
Our own daily collection started on 19 October 2026 and cannot be backfilled: the stores publish no history and the Internet Archive holds almost no captures of the chart feeds. For the United States we additionally show a reconstructed archive built from the CC-BY-4.0 dataset “App store charts 2010–2019” by the University of Amsterdam (osf.io/t29g8): iOS Top 100 Free on 741 days between 2010 and 2019, and Google Play Top 24 Free, Paid and Grossing (apps and games) on about 1,040 days between 2013 and 2019. Those points are labelled everywhere they appear, are sparse, reflect capture times rather than daily closes, and never feed movement, peak or streak statistics.
Collection time and cadence
One snapshot per day per chart, started at 06:02 UTC and finished within about two hours. Every snapshot is kept; nothing is overwritten. Movement is always versus the previous successful snapshot of the same chart.
Depth, device and coverage
Overall charts are stored 200 deep, App Store category charts 100 deep, Google Play category charts up to 200. iPhone charts only. 175 App Store storefronts and about 195 Google Play countries with their own ranking; Play markets that share a generic chart are excluded.
Quality checks
A snapshot is published only if enough charts were captured, a set of always-present apps appears where expected, chart sizes match recent days and the overlap with the previous day is plausible. Partial captures are marked on the page and never feed movement or peaks.
Known gaps and corrections
Outages and partial days are listed on the status page. If you spot a wrong name, icon or position, email hello@appwinners.eu; we correct metadata and annotate, never silently rewrite, historical positions.