Most people assume the App Store charts are close to static — that the top 100 is a fixed list of names everyone already knows, reshuffled slightly, with a new entry every few weeks. That is true of the overall chart. It is not remotely true of the category charts, which is where almost every app actually competes.
We crawl the US top 100 for every category, every day, and compare each day to the one before it. Here is the most recent comparison:
Measured, not estimated
Between 2026-08-14 and 2026-08-15, 732 apps appeared on a US top-100 chart that weren’t on one the day before — 13% of the 5,783 apps charting that day.
566 of them carry fewer than 1,000 ratings. Apple told none of them.
Why the number is that big
Two things drive it, and they compound.
The first is that a "chart" is not one list. Apple publishes a separate top 100 for each category, and separate charts for free, paid and grossing within each. So the thing people call "the App Store charts" is a few thousand ranked slots, not a hundred. A small app that could never touch the overall chart is competing for one of the other several thousand.
The second is that the bottom of a chart is much softer than the top. Ranks 1–10 in a big category are held by apps with enormous install bases and change rarely. Ranks 70–100 turn over constantly, because the difference in daily downloads between rank 80 and rank 110 is small enough that ordinary week-to-week noise — a feature placement, a seasonal bump, a competitor's push notification — is enough to swap them.
That second point is the one worth internalising. Most chart movement is happening in the part of the chart that a small app can realistically reach.
What this means if you have an app
Three practical consequences.
Charting is more achievable than the overall chart suggests. If you have looked at the top 10 free apps and concluded that charting is not a thing that happens to apps like yours, you were looking at the wrong list. The relevant question is what the 80th-ranked app in your category looks like — and in several categories, it looks a lot like a small indie app. That is the measurement behind which categories are easiest to chart in.
Charting is also easier to lose. The same softness that lets you in lets you out. An app that entered a category chart at rank 90 can be off it in three days without anything going wrong, and without any notification that it happened.
You will not be told either way. This is the part that surprises people most. Apple does not tell you when your app enters a chart, where it sits, or when it drops off — see what Apple actually reports about your rank. Chart position is public data that every one of your competitors can look up about you, and that you have to go and look up about yourself.
How we measure it
So you can judge the number rather than take it on faith:
- We read Apple's public top-100 feeds for every category and chart type, once per day.
- An "entrant" is an app that appears on any chart on a given day and appeared on no chart the day before. An app moving between two categories' charts is not counted.
- Turnover is entrants divided by the total number of distinct apps charting that day.
- Rating counts come from a separate daily metadata crawl, which is how we can say how many entrants are small ones.
Everything above is chart position and public rating counts. We do not publish download or revenue estimates, because we cannot calibrate them honestly, and a confident-looking number nobody can check is worse than no number.
Look at your own category
Turnover is not evenly distributed — some categories churn several times faster than others. Every category, ranked by how much its chart moved this week is the fastest way to see where yours sits, or go straight to a few of the busier ones:
If you want to know where one specific app stands, search for it — the page shows its current position and the daily history behind it.