Tony Wang14 min readLegacy Apps That Refuse to Die: A 15-Year-Old App Out-Grows the Newest Hits
WhatsApp is 15 years old and still adds ~15.2M Google Play ratings a year, second only to ChatGPT and ahead of TikTok, Temu, and Threads.
Gmail turns 15 this year. WhatsApp turns 16 next year. Both are older than the App Store review system that measures them. The easy assumption is that apps this old are coasting — huge, familiar, done growing, kept alive mostly by inertia and the hassle of switching providers. We pulled live rating counts and exact release dates for 16 consumer apps, split them by age, and divided ratings by years-since-launch to test that assumption directly. Some of these apps really are coasting. Others are adding ratings at a pace that would be remarkable for something a fifth their age — and the split has almost nothing to do with which one is older.
Google Play: a 15-year-old app is still in second place
Here's every app in our sample with a clean Google Play release date, ranked by ratings added per year:
WhatsApp is not resting on 239.7 million lifetime ratings because it's old and huge — it's adding roughly 15.2 million new ratings every year, at age 15.8. That's more than TikTok (6.3M/yr at 11 years old), more than Temu (3.2M/yr at not-quite-4), more than Threads, and more than every other app we checked except ChatGPT. Gmail, at nearly 16 years old, still out-paces Amazon Shopping, Cash App, eBay, and Amazon Kindle — all of them younger.
BeReal is the outlier in the other direction. It launched in January 2020, which makes it the youngest app in this chart by a wide margin next to the 2008–2015 cohort — and it's still the slowest, at under 56,000 ratings a year. Age didn't save it and age isn't punishing WhatsApp. Something else is doing the work.
The App Store agrees, and it's louder there
Google Play's Android base skews toward global, multi-year products; the App Store's US-heavy audience is a different test of the same question. Ranked the same way, on the same 2026-07-27 pull:
On the App Store, positions two, three, and four all belong to apps between 12 and 18 years old — Facebook is out-pacing every young app in the sample except ChatGPT, and TikTok's App Store listing (technically dating to its 2014 life as the lip-sync app Musical.ly, before its August 2018 rebrand) is right behind it. Only Threads and Temu, both under four years old, manage to out-run the median legacy app — and even they don't crack the top three.
Yelp is the App Store's Gmail-in-reverse: same 18-year vintage as Facebook, PayPal, and eBay, but the slowest app in the entire 16-app sample by a wide margin. Whatever kept Facebook and WhatsApp adding ratings at a young app's pace for a decade and a half, Yelp doesn't have it anymore.
Show the full table (all 16 apps, both stores, exact figures)
| App | Platform | Released | Rating count | Years old | Ratings/year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | App Store | 2023-05-18 | 8,890,482 | 3.2 | 2,787,000 |
| App Store | 2008-07-10 (corrected) | 27,377,878 | 18.0 | 1,516,800 | |
| TikTok | App Store | 2014-04-02 | 18,328,101 | 12.3 | 1,487,700 |
| App Store | 2009-05-04 | 18,320,141 | 17.2 | 1,062,500 | |
| Threads | App Store | 2023-07-05 | 2,118,587 | 3.1 | 692,300 |
| Cash App | App Store | 2013-10-16 | 8,554,816 | 12.8 | 669,300 |
| Temu | App Store | 2022-08-31 | 2,169,406 | 3.9 | 556,300 |
| Google Maps | App Store | 2012-12-13 | 7,289,498 | 13.6 | 535,200 |
| Amazon Shopping | App Store | 2008-12-03 | 8,415,756 | 17.7 | 476,800 |
| PayPal | App Store | 2008-07-10 (corrected) | 6,298,574 | 18.0 | 349,000 |
| Amazon Kindle | App Store | 2009-03-04 | 5,747,615 | 17.4 | 330,300 |
| eBay | App Store | 2008-07-10 (corrected) | 4,969,133 | 18.0 | 275,300 |
| Waze | App Store | 2009-08-01 | 3,181,612 | 17.0 | 187,200 |
| BeReal | App Store | 2020-01-08 | 1,151,367 | 6.5 | 176,600 |
| Gmail | App Store | 2011-11-02 | 2,425,664 | 14.7 | 164,600 |
| Yelp | App Store | 2008-07-10 (corrected) | 2,007,860 | 18.0 | 111,200 |
| ChatGPT | Google Play | 2023-07-21 | 51,158,304 | 3.0 | 16,940,200 |
| Google Play | 2010-10-18 | 239,780,764 | 15.8 | 15,195,000 | |
| TikTok | Google Play | 2015-07-09 | 69,448,013 | 11.1 | 6,285,900 |
| Temu | Google Play | 2022-08-25 | 12,375,126 | 3.9 | 3,157,900 |
| Gmail | Google Play | 2010-09-21 | 14,376,598 | 15.9 | 906,800 |
| Threads | Google Play | 2023-05-01 | 2,553,663 | 3.2 | 788,200 |
| Amazon Shopping | Google Play | 2014-12-10 | 4,631,748 | 11.6 | 398,300 |
| Cash App | Google Play | 2013-10-15 | 4,357,448 | 12.8 | 341,000 |
| eBay | Google Play | 2010-02-17 | 5,013,156 | 16.4 | 304,900 |
| Amazon Kindle | Google Play | 2010-06-28 | 4,739,481 | 16.1 | 294,700 |
| BeReal | Google Play | 2020-01-21 | 363,520 | 6.5 | 55,800 |
Source: 16 apps, live-verified individually via Crawlora's App Store and Google Play APIs (2026-07-27); PayPal, Google Maps, Yelp, Waze, and Facebook are excluded from the Google Play chart because their Play Store listings did not return a release date on this pull (their rating counts came through fine — see "How we did this").
Six apps, one era, six different trajectories
Hold the platform constant and compare apps of nearly the same age directly. These six all launched on the App Store within three years of each other, 2008 to 2011:
beats every young app in the sample except ChatGPT
well ahead of the cohort's middle
middling
middling
middling — the youngest of the six
slowest app in the entire 16-app sample
Facebook out-paces the next-closest app in this same-era group by more than 4x, and out-paces Yelp — its almost-exact contemporary — by nearly 14x. Age is a precondition for a big lifetime total. It explains almost nothing about whether an app is still adding ratings quickly today. That's the entire reason this piece measures a rate instead of a pile.
The bottom line
A 15-to-18-year-old app being enormous is not surprising — it has had a decade and a half to accumulate. What is surprising is that several of them are still accumulating at a pace that would be notable for an app a fifth their age: WhatsApp adds more Google Play ratings a year than TikTok, Temu, or Threads; Facebook and TikTok's legacy App Store listing both out-pace every young app in our sample except ChatGPT. But this isn't a story about age conferring durability — Yelp and BeReal, an 18-year-old and a 6.5-year-old, are the slowest apps in their respective charts. Some old apps refuse to die because they're still winning. Others are just still installed.
How we did this (and the caveats)
We picked 16 consumer apps to mix eras honestly rather than cherry-pick a "legacy apps win" story: 11 released between 2008 and 2015, and 5 released in 2022 or later, so any app in the ranking has to earn its position against apps of every age. For each one, we ran a live, single-app lookup against Crawlora's App Store and Google Play APIs (US storefront, 2026-07-27) to pull the exact all-time rating count and the store's own release date, then divided the two.
A real data-quality problem, caught and fixed. The App Store API's released field came back as January or February 2019 for four apps — Facebook, eBay, PayPal, and Yelp — despite all four being famous, decades-old products. We didn't take that at face value: a cross-check against Apple's own App Store 10th-anniversary retrospective and contemporaneous press coverage confirms eBay, Facebook, and Yelp were all live on the App Store's actual opening day, July 10, 2008, and PayPal's app was documented as available since the App Store launched, that same year. We corrected all four dates to 2008-07-10 for this piece and flagged the underlying field as unreliable for older, frequently-updated listings — a live, narrower echo of the same "don't trust one bulk field" lesson from our most-rated-apps piece. Every other release date in this dataset matched public record (Google Maps' iOS launch, for instance, is well documented as December 2012, and the API returned exactly that), so this looks like a bug specific to a handful of listings, not a wholesale failure of the field.
Five Google Play lookups returned no release date at all — PayPal, Google Maps, Yelp, Waze, and Facebook. Their rating counts came through cleanly (and match previously published figures), just not released. We excluded these five from the Google Play chart rather than guess, and used only the 11 Android apps with a clean date.
One footnote, not an error. TikTok's App Store listing carries an April 2014 release date — a full four years before the TikTok brand existed. That's not a data bug: TikTok's current US listing is the same one that launched as Musical.ly, the lip-sync app it absorbed and rebranded from in August 2018. The 18.3 million lifetime ratings on that listing include ratings left under both names.
Survivorship bias, stated plainly. This piece only measures apps that are both huge and still live in 2026. Decade-old messaging, shopping, and social apps that shrank or shut down entirely — Yahoo Messenger, Path, the original Foursquare check-in app, Vine — are invisible here by construction, because a dead app stops adding ratings and eventually stops being listed at all. "Several legacy apps are still growing fast" is a true finding about survivors; it is not evidence that most apps from 2008–2011 are still around, let alone thriving. The overwhelming majority are not.
One snapshot, one metric. These are rating counts as of 2026-07-27, not a time series — an app's ratings-per-year can (and does) change from one era of its life to the next; we're measuring lifetime average velocity, not this month's momentum. And a rating count measures scale and longevity, not satisfaction — pair it with a star score or a recent-reviews read (see are App Store reviews real?) before treating "still adding ratings fast" as "still loved."
Pull live App Store and Google Play data as clean JSON
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Frequently asked questions
Do old apps still get a lot of App Store or Google Play ratings?
Some do, at a pace that rivals apps a fraction of their age. WhatsApp, 15.8 years old on Google Play, adds about 15.2 million ratings a year — second only to ChatGPT (3 years old) and ahead of TikTok, Temu, and Threads. On the App Store, Facebook (18 years old) and TikTok's decade-old listing both out-pace every young app in a 16-app sample except ChatGPT. But it isn't universal: Yelp, also 18 years old, is the slowest-growing app in the entire App Store sample.
How do you measure whether an old app is still growing?
Total rating count alone just measures how long an app has existed — an old app will always have more than a young one of equal quality. We divided each app's all-time rating count by its exact years since release (as of 2026-07-27) to get ratings added per year, a velocity metric that lets a 3-year-old app and an 18-year-old app be compared fairly.
Which legacy apps are NOT still growing fast?
Yelp is the standout laggard: 18 years old on the App Store, but the slowest-growing app in our entire 16-app sample at about 111,000 ratings a year — a fraction of same-age Facebook's pace. BeReal, at 6.5 years the youngest app in our 'legacy-adjacent' comparison, is the single slowest app on Google Play. Age is not the deciding factor either way.
Can you trust the App Store's own app release dates?
Not always. Live-pulling the App Store API's `released` field for this piece returned January or February 2019 for Facebook, eBay, PayPal, and Yelp — despite all four being confirmed, via Apple's own App Store history and contemporaneous press coverage, to have been live on the store's actual opening day, July 10, 2008. We corrected all four dates from public record; every other release date in the sample matched public record without correction.
Is this survivorship bias?
Yes, and we say so directly. This piece only includes apps that are both huge and still live in 2026. Messaging, shopping, and social apps from the same 2008-2011 era that shrank or shut down — Yahoo Messenger, Path, the original Foursquare check-in app, Vine — are invisible here by construction. 'Several legacy apps are still growing fast' is a true finding about the survivors; it says nothing about the much larger number of apps from that era that did not make it.