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How App Store top charts work: free, paid, and grossing

Charts rank recent velocity — downloads for free and paid, gross consumer spend for grossing — per storefront and per genre. Apple publishes the order and nothing else.

Three charts, one shape

  • Top free and top paid rank download velocity, split by price.
  • Top grossing ranks gross consumer spend velocity — paid price plus in-app purchases plus subscription billings, before Apple's commission.
  • Every chart exists per storefront and per genre: an overall chart plus one per category, each computed from that country's activity alone.

Apple does not publish the formula. Observed behavior points to a short, recency-weighted window — days, not lifetime — which is why a strong launch spikes a chart position it cannot hold and a steady subscription app sits on the grossing chart for years.

What is actually public

Ordered lists, top 100, nothing more — no download counts, no revenue figures, no positions past 100. Today the grossing lists survive only in Apple's legacy RSS feeds, which openaso's charts tool reads, archives daily, and degrades around honestly (grossingUnavailable: true) rather than fabricating if the feed dies. An app outside a chart's top 100 reports null — unobservable, not rank 101.

charts → one storefront, three verdicts
{
  "appId": 576649830,
  "storefronts": [
    { "country": "US", "topFree": null, "topPaid": null,
      "topGrossing": 34, "grossingUnavailable": false }
  ]
}

Why the grossing chart matters most

A grossing rank is the only public signal of any app's monetization — Apple publishes no revenue for apps you do not own. Because chart position maps to spend velocity through a steep power law, a grossing rank bounds revenue to an order of magnitude, which is exactly how the revenue estimation methodology uses it. Free and paid ranks carry the same information about downloads, with the same caveats.

Reading chart movement

  • The power law makes movement asymmetric: climbing #80 → #60 is a modest change in velocity; #10 → #5 is enormous. Never read chart deltas linearly.
  • Positions breathe daily with promotions, weekends, and seasonality. Trend beats snapshot — openaso archives grossing positions daily precisely so history reads a series, not a coin flip.
  • Genre charts are shallower pools than the overall chart: #12 in Photo & Video and #12 overall are different universes. Always note which chart a rank comes from.

FAQ

Does charting well improve search rankings?

Not through any documented direct coupling. Chart visibility drives downloads, and downloads are a behavior signal search does use — so charts act on search the way a billboard acts on sales.

Why does my app show null for every chart?

Public chart data stops at position 100 per chart, per storefront, per genre. Null means outside the observable top 100 of that specific chart — most apps, most of the time — not zero downloads or revenue.

Are chart positions global?

No. Every chart is computed per storefront: #3 grossing in Japan says nothing about the US chart. Cross-country comparisons need the storefront's market size factored in.

How fast do charts update?

Apple refreshes chart order multiple times a day, over a recency-weighted window it does not document. Day-to-day movement is mostly noise around velocity; sustained multi-day movement is signal.

Terms

  • top-grossing chart — The per-storefront, per-genre top-100 ranking of gross consumer spend velocity — the one public monetization signal on the App Store.
  • chart velocity — The recency-weighted rate of downloads or spend a chart actually ranks, as opposed to lifetime totals.
  • genre chart — A chart restricted to one category in one storefront — shallower and easier to enter than the overall chart it parallels.

markdown mirror: /reference/top-charts.md · full corpus: /llms-full.txt