Where can I see historical App Store chart rankings?

Nowhere, unless somebody recorded them. Apple publishes today's charts and no archive, so every chart-history product only has data from the day it started collecting, and a day nobody captured is gone permanently. That is the single most important thing to understand about this data.

Does a rank climb mean an app got more downloads?

Not necessarily. Rank is relative, so an app can climb because it gained installs, because a competitor lost them, because a paid campaign started, or because Apple featured it. The chart records the movement and publishes no reason, and inventing one is how a data post becomes fiction.

How deep do the public charts go?

Apple's legacy chart feeds cap at 100 entries per chart, per category, per storefront. Below that there is nothing to read, which is why "it dropped off the chart" and "it fell to 150" look identical from outside.

How to read App Store chart movement

Chart movement is the most quoted and least understood signal on the App Store. It is genuinely useful, and it supports far fewer conclusions than people draw from it.

Rank is relative, so movement has four possible causes

An app at #43 is not at #43 because of an absolute number. It is there because 42 apps did better that day. So a climb from 75 to 43 in a week can mean:

the app gained installs;
the apps above it lost installs;
somebody started paying for installs;
Apple featured it, or a press cycle happened.

Apple publishes none of the reasons. The honest form of the sentence is "UKG Pro went 75 to 43 in a week", full stop. Anything after that is a hypothesis, and it should be labelled as one every single time. We hold our own marketing posts to that rule: the climb is measured, the cause is not.

History does not exist unless somebody kept it

Apple serves today's chart and nothing else. There is no archive, no back-fill, and no endpoint that will tell you where an app ranked last March. Every chart-history product, ours included, only has what it recorded, starting from the day it started recording.

Two consequences worth internalising. Movement needs at least two days of captured data to exist at all, so a brand-new tracker shows you nothing on day one no matter what it costs. And a day nobody captured is gone permanently, which is why capture reliability matters more in this category than almost anything else in the product.

The chart floor hides the most interesting half

Apple's legacy feeds return 100 entries per chart, per category, per storefront. An app that leaves the chart and an app that falls to rank 400 produce exactly the same observation: absence. Never read a disappearance as a collapse.

The same floor is why new entrants are worth watching. An app appearing in a top 40 it was not in last week actually crossed a threshold, which is a stronger signal than a mid-chart wobble.

Which chart you read changes the question

Top Free is an attention signal. It moves fastest and means the least in isolation.
Top Grossing is the money signal, and the one that matters for whether a category pays. If nothing small ever appears in a category's top ten grossing, small apps do not get paid there.
Top Paid is a thin, unrepresentative slice of a store that mostly sells subscriptions now.

Movement over a week is noisy; over four it is a trend

A single week is two points, and two points are a line, not a trend. Fit anything you want to call momentum over about four weeks. Our own scoring does exactly that regardless of whether the report window is a week or a month, which is why an idea's score is comparable between a weekly and a monthly run even though the movers they discuss are not.

Also watch acceleration rather than level. An app growing steadily and an app whose growth is speeding up are different competitors, and the second one is a much worse target for a solo developer than its current rank suggests.

Where movement fits

Movement is a pointer, not a conclusion. It tells you whose lane is being contested right now, which is a good reason to go and read that app's recent negative reviews. It does not tell you whether the category is enterable, which is the wall, and it does not tell you what anything earns.