When flicking through Apple’s iOS App Store on my iPhone this morning, I noticed that of the ‘top ten’ free apps, I have only two installed. Of the ‘top twenty’, I have only six installed. And of the ‘top twenty’ paid apps, I have none installed.

Digging deeper into the lists, I have 22 of the ‘top fifty’ free apps installed, and one of the ‘top fifty’ paid apps.

In the early days of the App Store, I would typically have a high proportion of the most popular apps installed.

I’ve been pondering what this might mean. Perhaps I am an outlier who doesn’t use the things most people use? Or perhaps the explosion of apps over the years now means that the variety people install tends to be broader, and the most popular apps are installed on a much smaller proportion of devices.

A lot of the apps on the ‘paid’ list strike me as fairly niche: three of the ‘top ten’ are apps for those learning to drive, which surely makes up only a small proportion of iPhone users. This supports the hypothesis that installations have become more varied, and that the ‘top ten’ has less pull. But that observation doesn’t carry over to the ‘free’ list, with the most popular apps seemingly having broad appeal.

Or maybe, just maybe, it’s not a good idea to try to draw conclusions based on a sample size of one.

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.