What moved on the App Store: week of 3 August 2026

Every day we snapshot Apple's charts in the US, UK and Turkey, across all 25 categories and three chart types. This is the Week of Aug 3, 2026 run: chart moves measured over a seven-day window, review evidence from each app's most recent sample, 200 scored ideas.

The biggest climbs

Chart movement is a two-point diff, so it needs two days of history and nothing else. No estimates, no modelling. These are the largest free-chart jumps in the window:

1. WLOC+80

   #97 → #17 · Developer Tools · US · free top 100

2. Moonlitt: Lunar Calendar+71

   #75 → #4 · Weather · UK · free top 100

3. Last Earthquakes+67

   #83 → #16 · News · TR · free top 100

4. Solid Starts: Baby First Foods+67

   #77 → #10 · Education · UK · free top 100

5. Jelly Busters: Puzzle Game+64

   #87 → #23 · Games · UK · free top 100

6. ZYMIX+61

   #80 → #19 · Social Networking · UK · free top 100

Four of the six are UK. That is not a UK growth story, it is a size story: a smaller storefront has a shorter chart tail, so a modest number of installs carries an app much further up it. Which is exactly what the next section prices.

What it costs to enter a top 100

We model an entry wall for every category and storefront: roughly how many ratings an app needs before it can hold a top 100 slot. Pick a storefront below; these are the cheapest doors each one had open this run.

Same store, same week, and the widest gap in the run is 1,974,679 ratings for Entertainment in the US against 54 for Shopping in Turkey. Picking the storefront is a bigger decision than picking the feature, and almost nobody treats it as one.

The same category is priced three different ways:

• Shopping: about 37,024 ratings in the US, about 54 in Turkey, a 686x gap.
• News: about 512,286 ratings in the US, about 957 in Turkey, a 535x gap.
• Sports: about 294,422 ratings in the US, about 753 in Turkey, a 391x gap.

Charting, and hated

A chart position says an app has distribution. It says nothing about whether the people inside it are happy, and the gap between those two signals is where the openings are. Counts are how many of the sampled reviewers said the same thing.

Two different categories, two different countries, one identical failure: the customer paid and the app did not deliver what the payment was for. Neither of these needs a better algorithm to beat. It needs the entitlement to work.

What scored highest

Every idea is scored 0–100 on demand, winnability, monetization, feasibility and momentum, with a penalty for picking a fight with a giant. The scoring engine is public, weights included, so you can disagree with a number rather than take it on faith.

• Sixdigit

  Utilities · UK · week to build

  93/100

  Takes from Authenticator App - 2FA MFA · Quick win

• Twenty Quid

  Food & Drink · UK · month to build

  93/100

  Takes from Herbi: Meal Planner + Recipes · Prime bet

• Kept

  Shopping · US · weekend to build

  88/100

  Takes from Consumer Reports · Crowded

Sixdigit is the shape worth noticing: not the biggest market in the run, but a week of build time, no backend, and an incumbent whose own users are describing the feature to remove. TOTP is a fixed public algorithm with no running cost, yet the charting apps in that lane are subscriptions with cloud accounts attached.

What this run cost

Building in public means the bill too. This run took 7,668,366 model tokens across 25 categories, 53 agents and 6.5 hours of agent time, about 38,342 tokens per scored idea. 27% of those tokens went on retries, which is the number worth watching: it is what tells me a stage is quietly half-working.

Check it yourself

Weekly runs go to subscribers, but a complete monthly run is published free and in full: all 25 categories, all three storefronts, every score and the evidence behind it. Older monthly runs land in the archive as they age out. If you only want one number, the keyword checker is free and needs no account.