Our download rankings answer two different questions — who ships the most apps, and who publishes other people's. Here is how each company is measured, classified and grouped, and what the resulting numbers do not say.
One metric, applied identically to every company: estimated lifetime iOS App Store installs, summed across every app the company operates. The estimates come from MWM Intelligence, our own app-market dataset.
company total = Σ lifetime iOS installs, one count per app
Android is not counted. A company that leans on Google Play is under-represented here, and a comparison with an all-store figure is not a comparison.
Cumulative installs since release. A long-lived catalogue weighs more than a recent hit, which is the point of a publisher ranking.
An app present under two accounts of the same company is counted once. Store scrapes keep transferred apps under both accounts for a while.
Figures are shown as thresholds crossed, in 25-million steps. Estimates are not precise enough to publish to the unit.
We rank operating companies, not developer accounts. A single company often ships under several App Store accounts — legacy studios, acquired brands, country entities — and ranking accounts instead of companies would scatter one business across a dozen lines.
The line between merging and not merging is operational, not financial. An acquired entity absorbed into the buyer's operation, whose brand no longer runs as a unit, is merged. One that still operates under its own brand and team is ranked on its own line, with its owner noted rather than merged.
Accounts and sub-brands absorbed into one operation — Ketchapp inside Ubisoft, AppRover inside MWM, the former Mosaic portfolio inside Bending Spoons.
Subsidiaries still operating under their own brand and team, with the owner noted: Easybrain under Miniclip, BeReal under Voodoo, Green Panda Games under Ubisoft.
Games and non-game apps are different businesses: games monetize sessions through in-app purchases and advertising, non-game apps monetize a recurring job, mostly through subscriptions. Ranking them together buries the second group, so every ranking is split in two. Which side a company lands on is computed, never assigned.
> 75 % of installs in App Store Games → games · > 75 % outside → apps · in between → hybrid
Hybrids are ranked on their majority side and flagged with an asterisk. The test uses the App Store category, not our judgement of the genre — which is why a title such as Akinator, listed under Entertainment, counts on the apps side.
An app company is any company that distributes apps on the stores — a bank, a retailer, a games studio, a platform. An app publisher is a company whose business is publishing apps it did not necessarily build. Every publisher is an app company; very few app companies are publishers.
The test is a publicly declared activity — a publishing programme, a developer submission page, an app-acquisition offer — not a track record of acquisitions. Without that rule, any company that ever bought an app would qualify and the ranking would mean nothing. It also keeps every decision auditable against a public source.
Companies that sign external developers and fund, launch and grow their apps.
Companies that acquire apps and operate them on shared growth, data and monetization infrastructure.
Companies that only ship what they build, however large — Supercell, King and Snap among them.
Apps that extend an operating system, marketplace or social graph, and apps that are the counter of a business transacted elsewhere.
A company is attached to the country of its operating headquarters, not of its legal registration — an offshore holding does not move a company. Regional rankings state their perimeter explicitly rather than leaving it implied.
No geographic filter. Companies are grouped, classified and ranked by the same rules wherever they sit.
Headquartered in Europe, the UK, Ukraine and Belarus included; Russia excluded. The exception is named rather than left implicit.
Publisher rankings start at 25 million lifetime installs. Company rankings exclude nobody, so they start at 100 million — a wider net needs a higher bar.
Within one threshold, the order follows the underlying estimates rather than the rounded figure.
A ranking that hides its limits is not citable. These are the ones that matter when reading ours.
These are modelled download estimates, not numbers published or certified by the companies listed. Treat close positions as close, not as ordered.
Volume and money rank differently. A publisher can sit low here and be far more profitable than one above it.
Two companies shown at the same threshold can differ by nearly 25 million installs, and one shown a step higher may be barely ahead.
Classification is curated company by company from public sources. The rankings are complete at the top and thin out near the entry threshold, where a publisher may still be missing.
A few companies publish no location at all. We show a dash rather than guess, and they are ranked worldwide but absent from regional tables.
The apps-versus-games line follows the App Store category. Titles that play like games but ship under Entertainment or Education count on the apps side.
mwm.ai is operated by MWM, which appears in several of these rankings. Every rule on this page applies to every company listed, MWM included.
See the rankings