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20 days of App Store charts and Google Trends in 20 countries

· Webatola

Since 21 October I've been saving Apple's top free and top paid iPhone charts once a day, and Google's "Trending now" list every six hours, for 20 countries. Nothing clever, just JSON files. Neither Apple nor Google keeps this history, so if you don't save it yourself it's gone.

Twenty days in, these are the things that stood out. Every number below comes from those snapshots. How they were collected, and the limits, are at the end.

A camera app that skipped the climb

Chromagraph Camera ($12.99 in the US) came out on 20 October. In the snapshot on 28 October it wasn't in the top 100 paid apps in any of the 20 countries. The next morning it was in the top 100 in all 20, and #1 in seven: US, Canada, Australia, India, France, Spain and the Netherlands.

On 31 October it was #1 in 14 countries. On 9 November it's still in the top 10 in 19 of the 20 (South Korea, #21, is the exception) and #1 in four: US, Canada, India and Japan. Over the 20 days that adds up to 93 country-days at #1 in the paid chart (one country on one day counts as one). Second is Blitzer.de PRO with 65, a speed camera warning app that was #1 every single day in Germany and Austria, and on 17 days in Poland, which surprised me.

On 30 October, a day after it entered the charts, its price dropped in six countries. The US price stayed at $12.99.

Country    29 Oct      30 Oct
India      ₹1,299      ₹349
Mexico     MX$299      MX$119
Brazil     R$79.90     R$34.90
Poland     59.99 zł    35.99 zł
Czechia    349 Kč      209 Kč
Slovakia   €14.99      €7.99

Other camera apps moved up too. Across the 20 countries there are 200 top-10 slots in the paid chart, and Photo & Video apps held 10 of them on 21 October and 35 on 9 November. ROLLIE'S, a 35mm film camera app, went from outside the top 100 into the top 10 in five countries. Moment Pro Camera II climbed 40+ places in four.

Claude vs ChatGPT, country by country

ChatGPT is in the top 10 free apps in 19 of the 20 countries almost every day. South Korea is the exception, #14 on 21 October and #16 on 9 November. It doesn't get to #1 that often though, 21 country-days in total, mostly India and Mexico.

Claude was #1 on 69 country-days, more than any other free app. Nearly all of that was in Europe: Germany, Spain and France most days, plus the Netherlands, Austria, Slovakia and Czechia on and off.

On 9 November Claude ranks above ChatGPT in exactly 10 of the 20 countries, and the split is pretty geographic:

  • Claude ahead: Austria, Switzerland, Czechia, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Netherlands, Slovakia, South Korea
  • ChatGPT ahead: US, UK, Canada, Australia, India, Japan, Brazil, Mexico, Poland, Sweden

Gemini was in the top 10 in 17 countries on 21 October and in 14 on 9 November.

Netflix Game Controller on Sundays

Netflix Game Controller, the app that turns a phone into a gamepad for Netflix games on a TV, is in the top 10 free apps in 0–2 countries on most days. On Sundays it was in the top 10 in 8 countries (25 October), 9 (1 November) and 6 (8 November). The Monday snapshots were lower but still high, 5, 6 and 4, and after that it fell back. The snapshot is taken at 07:20 Prague time, which is early Sunday morning in Europe and still Saturday night in the Americas.

Short-drama apps climbed in the same chart. ReelShort went from #49 to #2 in Brazil between 21 October and 9 November, DramaWave from #64 to #4 in Poland, and DramaBox climbed 40+ places in four countries.

Google Trends: what trended in many countries at once

1,540 snapshots (20 countries, every 6 hours) contained 11,398 different search terms. 9,280 of them showed up in a single snapshot and never again.

The terms that showed up in the most countries:

  • "twitch", 15 countries on 10 different days. The news Google attached to it changed from place to place, for example Dele Alli starting a streaming career (UK, Switzerland, Sweden), a Pokémon livestream (Japan) or a German streamer's death (Czechia).
  • "motogp", 11 countries, on two race weekends: 24–25 October and 8 November, with 20K+ searches in Spain on 8 November.
  • Taylor Fritz, Daniil Medvedev and Alexander Zverev, 9 countries each.
  • "binance", 7 countries within a few hours on 30 October. The news Google linked was about a suspected hack, $6.3bn according to the headlines.
  • "el niño", 8 countries on 8 different days between 22 October and 9 November.

A few terms just kept coming back. "Stock market today" was in the trending list on 13 of the 20 days (mostly the UK feed, plus Canada and Australia), "gas prices" on 12 days (UK, Canada, US), and "gta 6" on 11 days across 7 countries.

The biggest traffic bands were for the weather, which is a bit boring but true. Only two entries reached 500K+: "天気" (weather) in Japan on 24 October and "clima" in Brazil on 2 November. The one I liked most came from the UK on the night of Remembrance Sunday, 8 November, "why 41 poppies on the king's wreath" with 50K+.

How the data was collected

  • App Store: Apple's public RSS feed for top free and top paid iPhone apps (top 100), plus the iTunes Lookup API for price, genre and ratings. One snapshot a day at 07:20 Prague time.
  • Google Trends: the public "Trending now" RSS feed, 10 terms per country, every 6 hours (00:10, 06:10, 12:10 and 18:10 Prague time).
  • Countries: US, UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden, Canada, Australia, India, Brazil, Mexico, Japan, South Korea.
  • Period: 21 October (from 06:10) to 9 November 2026 (until 06:10). 97 collection runs, none failed.

Some limits, so nobody reads too much into this:

  • One chart snapshot a day misses everything that happens between them.
  • Google's traffic numbers are rough bands ("200+", "50K+"), not counts.
  • The Trends feed only shows 10 terms at a time, so a big term can still fall between two snapshots.
  • Terms are matched as exact lowercase text, so "putellas" and "alexia putellas" count as two different terms.
  • Apple sometimes publishes fewer than 100 paid apps (95–99).
  • Nothing here explains why an app or a term moved, the data only shows that it did.

If you want the same data

The archive runs on Apify with the same code as two of my public Actors. App Store Top Charts returns a country's chart with price, genre and ratings, at $1 per 1,000 apps on Apify's free plan, so one top-100 chart is about $0.10 plus a $0.005 start fee. Google Trends Trending Now costs $1.50 per 1,000 trends. If you schedule both on Apify and save the output to a named storage, after a few weeks you'll have your own version of this. (Prices checked 9 November 2026; paid Apify plans pay a little less.)

I'll do this every month from now on, the full November goes out in early December. If there's a country or a chart you'd like me to add to the archive, tell me.