How rankings work

Formula v3. Charts are recomputed every hour for all categories, each category and each subcategory. Rankings cannot be bought, and sponsored placements (when they exist) are always labeled and never change a rank.

The charts

  • Top Paid: paid apps, last 7 days.
  • Top Free: every free app, from indie developers and the open source shelf, last 7 days.
  • Top Free (Open Source): the open source apps alone, ranked by AppsXi downloads. It has no tab while it would repeat Top Free; older links to it still work.
  • Rising: apps first published on AppsXi in the last 60 days, this week compared with last week.
  • Top Grossing: paid apps, revenue after refunds over the last 30 days.
  • Top Rated: apps with at least 5 verified reviews.
  • All Time: paid apps, verified sales since AppsXi opened.

What counts

  • Sales are paid licenses from completed orders. Free grants (100% off codes), trials, test licenses and sandbox orders never count.
  • Downloads are downloads from the AppsXi store. Each visitor counts at most once per app per day. In-app update downloads never count. AppsXi does not store IP addresses; visitors are told apart by a hash that changes every day.
  • Ratings come from buyers on paid apps and, on free apps, from people who downloaded the app from AppsXi while signed in, a day or more after getting it. They are pulled toward the store average until an app has enough reviews (a Bayesian average), so one 5 star review cannot top a chart.

What never counts

  • Purchases by the developer or anyone on the developer's team.
  • Orders refunded, fully or partly, within 14 days, and orders under dispute.
  • Apps that are hidden from search while a person checks them (Approved: Limited) or that are on a leaderboard hold.

Reduced weight

  • A sale below 50% of the list price counts as half a sale.
  • A first purchase from an account created less than a day earlier counts as half a sale. This damps sudden spikes from brand new accounts; those spikes are also reviewed by a person.

Scores

Counts are log scaled and compared with the leading app in the same chart and category, so a $5 app and a $50 app can compete and one huge app does not flatten everyone else.

Top Paid

score = 0.45 × paid sales (7 days)
      + 0.20 × unique buyers (7 days)
      + 0.15 × revenue (7 days)
      + 0.10 × rating
      + 0.10 × retention
      − penalties

Retention is the share of AppsXi Desktop installs from the last 120 days, at least a week old, where the app was opened again 7 or more days after it was installed. It only comes from people who turned on “Share anonymous app usage” in Desktop, which sends nothing but the install day and the days an app was opened. An app needs 20 such installs before its own retention is used; until then it gets the average of the apps that have one (0.5 while none do), so a small or new app is neither helped nor hurt.

Top Free

score = 0.80 × (downloads (7 days) + GitHub stars ÷ 1,000)
      + 0.20 × rating
      − penalties

Open source apps arrive with years of GitHub stars and indie apps arrive with none, so stars count at 1,000 to one AppsXi download this week. An indie app with 10 downloads this week ranks alongside open source apps with about 10,000 stars, and stars matter less as AppsXi downloads grow. Only open source apps have stars to count. Apps with the same score are ordered by GitHub stars. Rank badges are only offered for apps with downloads in the window.

Top Free (Open Source)

score = 0.80 × downloads (7 days)
      + 0.20 × rating
      − penalties

Apps with the same score, including apps with no AppsXi downloads yet, are ordered by GitHub stars.

Rising

growth = (this week − last week) ÷ √(last week + 4)

“This week” is paid sales for paid apps and downloads for free apps. An app needs at least 3 this week and more than last week. The square root rewards both large and fast growth without letting a jump from 0 to 1 win.

Top Grossing, Top Rated, All Time

Top Grossing ranks by revenue after refunds over 30 days (revenue figures are never shown). Top Rated uses the Bayesian average with a weight of 10 reviews at the store average. All Time ranks by weighted paid sales since launch.

Penalties

  • A refund rate above 10% over 30 days (with at least 20 orders) subtracts 0.20 from Top Paid.
  • Each active trust and safety strike on the developer subtracts 0.10, up to 0.30.
  • Confirmed manipulation, including fake or incentivized reviews and buying your own app, removes the app from every chart for 90 days. Repeated manipulation ends the developer account.

Badges

Apps in the top 10 of a chart get a badge and a social card they can share, for example “#1 in Top Paid, Menu Bar Utilities.” Badges always show the current rank and link back to the listing. Developers find them on their app's Leaderboard page.

Changes

When the formula changes, this page shows the new version number and what changed before the new formula is used. Questions or a ranking you think is wrong: report it.

  • v2 (October 2026): retention in Top Paid now comes from opt-in AppsXi Desktop usage, with the 20 install minimum and average fill described above. Pay what you want apps rank on the paid charts.
  • v1 (launch): retention was zero for every app.