How does Apple calculate the iTunes App Store charts?
October 4, 2010 9:17 AM   Subscribe

How does Apple calculate the iTunes App Store charts?

The company I work for has just created a new department to make Apps for phones and tablets, and our first iPad App went to number 1 in the iTunes store charts.

Everyone's very happy, but it got me wondering how Apple actually calculates the chart positions - I've googled but not been able to turn up much. From what I can tell it's some measure of cumulative downloads from the past few days, current day's downloads and then, it seems to me, some metric for "momentum" (% increase over previous day maybe)?

Any info or links greatly appreciated!
posted by Sifter to Technology (2 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
They probably just keep tabs on how many times each App has been downloaded, or how many iPhone users have downloaded it, how many people currently have it, etc. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure this is essentially how it works. Anything along those lines.
posted by AlisonNicole at 8:52 AM on February 4, 2011


Response by poster: Updating this just for the record, in case anyone else find this question useful. This post on RWW came in useful - it claims to contain the formula.
posted by Sifter at 6:01 AM on February 15, 2011


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