Last summer, Bria Sullivan embarked on an ambitious journey with the launch of her app, Focus Friend. This charming digital companion was designed to help users manage their screen time. Sullivan’s lofty aspiration was to achieve 100,000 downloads. Collaborating with Hank Green, a creator with a massive following, she harbored the hope that Focus Friend might break into the top 10 of the productivity category. Yet, considering the competition, including juggernauts like ChatGPT and Google, even this seemed optimistic. “Our category has ChatGPT, it has Google,” Sullivan noted. “I mean, productivity includes Gmail!”

Initially, Sullivan discreetly released the app on the iOS App Store without much fanfare. However, by August, the app began to gain momentum due to significant promotion from Green and his equally famous brother, coupled with extensive media coverage, including from The Verge. Focus Friend quickly ascended the charts, first entering the top 10 in its category, then climbing to the top 10 overall. When it reached the #4 position, Green expressed his desire to see it hit number one. Sullivan remained skeptical, saying, “I was like, ‘That’s not happening,’” but she appreciated the optimism.

The app’s ascent continued. On August 18th, Sullivan went to bed with Focus Friend sitting at #2 on the charts. “I probably woke up every hour, and just kept refreshing,” she recounted. To her amazement, on August 19th, Focus Friend claimed the top spot, becoming the most popular free app in the United States across both the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store. Sullivan’s developer friends sent her congratulatory messages, and both Green and his brother created videos celebrating the app’s meteoric rise. “I’ve been making apps since 2010,” Sullivan reflected, “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.”

However, the triumph was brief. As the store refreshed, ChatGPT reclaimed its position as the leading app, a spot it had dominated for 22 days prior and would maintain for 23 days thereafter. Focus Friend’s little venture to the top of mobile software charts lasted just a single day.

Yet, even that one day was significant. Focus Friend now holds the coveted title of a “#1 in the App Store” app, a fact proudly displayed on its website. Sullivan has spent the ensuing months finding subtle ways to mention this achievement in conversations. She has numerous screenshots of the App Store charts from that day and is contemplating printing one on large posterboard for her video call backdrop. It turns out that the greatest reward of reaching #1 in the App Store isn’t just about user numbers or business viability. It’s the pride of being able to say you were number one.

My intrigue about life at the pinnacle of the App Store was piqued when OpenAI’s Sora app launched in October. It rocketed to the top of the rankings and remained there for 20 days. Sora was clearly a success, but its presence was oddly unnoticed among my acquaintances. This led me to ponder: how significant is the reach of an app like Sora, and what does achieving the #1 spot truly entail?

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.

For virtually every app that hits the top of the charts — a full 478 of the 568 on the list — the run is short, 10 days or fewer. 292 apps lasted three days or fewer at the top, and 130 of those were number one for just one day. The 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 did 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 summit, she said she figured 200,000 downloads in a day will almost always get you there. Other developers I talked to seemed to agree with the rough estimate, or maybe a smidge higher. But one thing I heard over and over is that App Store rankings are something of a mystery. The rankings seem to refresh a few times a day and seem to take into account the trailing 24 hours of downloads. Downloads and chart positions seem correlated — nobody I spoke to accused Apple of putting its thumb on the scale or manipulating the charts in any way.

Your best shot at hitting #1 in the App Store appears to be right after launch. Your next best shot appears to be offering free stuff in exchange for app downloads, like Taco Bell, Chick-fil-A, McDonald’s, Jimmy John’s, and Krispy Kreme all have. Otherwise, you need some kind of massive cultural event to catapult you up the charts: Peacock, for instance, has had eight separate stints at #1, nearly all of them on days the streamer was either airing a big NFL game, the World Cup, or the Olympics. The New York City Marathon app hit #1 in 2024 on the day of the New York City Marathon. The Smithsonian Solar Eclipse 2017 app, well, you can probably guess that one. Most recently, the change in TikTok’s ownership (and the app’s subsequent failures) sent a rival social network, UpScrolled, briefly to #1.

Cesar Kuriyama, the 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 stitches them into a yearlong timelapse. The app launched in 2013, and “our entire first year, we didn’t get a lot of attention on the App Store,” Kuriyama says. “Then, all of a sudden, on New Year’s Day, we were like, hey look, we’re rising up the ranks.” People were sharing their yearlong timelapses, creating a viral moment for the app — people saw the videos, downloaded the app, and started making their own. 1 Second Everyday routinely gets hundreds of thousands of downloads on December 31st and January 1st, Kuriyama says, which lands it near the top of the App Store.

I’ve come to think of “#1 on the App Store” as roughly the equivalent of “New York Times bestselling author” or “Oscar-nominated actress.” There’s no exact correlation between those accolades and any kind of business longevity, but it is a universally understood imprimatur of success. It becomes the top line on your résumé, the first slide in the pitch deck, a fact nobody can take away from you no matter the dollars-and-cents details. Multiple developers told me that hitting #1 immediately made it easier to get meetings with potential partners and spin up new projects.

“You see Slack messages exploding, you see your phone buzzing with messages and phone calls,” says Ben Moore, the managing director of BeReal. “Screenshots are being shared on WhatsApp, on Telegram. You might get some investors texting you, like, ‘what the hell is going on?’” But he says the phenomenon is more like a spike than a switch flipping. “Yeah, it’s a moment — but it’s not really the destination.”

Moore describes hitting the top of the App Store as sort of like going viral on social media. It happens fast, almost always without warning, and it suddenly feels like the whole world is looking at you. It’s hard not to be intoxicated. And then all those new people paying attention to you… stop. “You end up attracting users that didn’t necessarily come for the core value of your app,” he says. “You have people installing the app, playing with it for one day, two days, and then… they churn.” He says he’s learned to stay disciplined, growing the app one user at a time rather than chasing another spike.

That virality has other costs, too. A surge in downloads can strain infrastructure, forcing companies to shell out for more servers or more customer support help that may not even be needed in a couple of days. Hitting #1 can amplify a trend, but also gives others reasons to hijack it. “We saw a surge in downloads, a wave of press coverage (including some controversial takes), and plenty of copycats,” says Alex Chernoburov, the chief product officer at Ticket to the Moon.

One of Ticket to the Moon’s photo-editing apps, Gradient, shipped a feature in 2019 that claimed to tell users what celebrity they looked like. It hit the top of the App Store when multiple Kardashians and other celebs started posting about it and was immediately hit by backlash to the app’s price and some problematic look-alike choices. Then came the clones, with names like My Replica and Look Like You? Celebrity!, some of which were so blatantly scammy they were removed from the App Store. Chernoburov says he thinks the upsides outweigh the downsides, but like Moore and BeReal, he also says the real job is to not chase virality but build lasting products and customers.

Ultimately, here’s the shocking takeaway: if you make an app, you should want it to hit #1 on the App Store. It won’t immediately change your life, and continually 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 you can’t even begin to predict.

But that doesn’t matter. All you need is a day. The screenshot. The text messages, the Slacks, the excited investors and partners and friends. The new website header you get to write. Because once you’re a #1 app, you’re always a #1 app.