Tony Wang12 min readThe Most-Rated Apps in the World, iOS vs. Android
No one ranks apps by rating count. We built one: WhatsApp leads Google Play with 240M ratings, the App Store leader is different, and the gap runs to 62x.
Type "most rated apps" into a search engine and you'll get ranking-factor guides, ASO blog posts, and — on the day we checked — a couple of thin spam pages parked on hacked government domains. What you won't find is an actual answer. Apple doesn't publish a most-rated chart. Neither does Google. The analytics firms that do publish rankings — Sensor Tower, Appfigures, data.ai — rank by downloads and revenue, because that's what their customers pay for. Nobody tracks lifetime rating counts as a leaderboard.
So we built one, for both stores, and the two stores don't agree with each other.
Two different winners
Start with each store on its own terms, because — as you're about to see — merging them into one list would be misleading.
On the App Store, the top of the leaderboard skews toward apps with a long US-heavy history and toward the gig-economy apps that turned out to be a genuine surprise:
DoorDash and Lyft sitting above Snapchat, Netflix, and every bank's app is the first surprise in this data: gig-economy apps aren't usually filed next to social media in the "engagement app" bracket, but by raw rating volume, DoorDash alone out-rates Facebook Messenger and Snapchat combined.
On Google Play, the leaderboard looks completely different — dominated by global messaging apps and, further down, by a mobile game and a shopping app most US readers have never opened:
WhatsApp's Google Play count alone (239.7 million) is larger than the entire App Store top 10 combined. That's the scale gap this piece is actually about.
The platform gap, mapped
For 18 apps we could verify cleanly on both stores, here's the same app's rating count on iOS next to Android. The bars run from near-parity to a 62x gap, and the direction isn't always the same way:
Show the full table (all 18 apps, exact counts)
| App | App Store | Google Play | Android ÷ iOS |
|---|---|---|---|
| Telegram | 275,909 | 17,095,582 | 62.0x |
| 18,320,141 | 239,688,745 | 13.1x | |
| Messenger | 13,126,722 | 113,069,844 | 8.6x |
| Snapchat | 5,890,770 | 39,618,278 | 6.7x |
| 27,377,878 | 183,959,639 | 6.7x | |
| Gmail | 2,425,664 | 14,376,605 | 5.9x |
| 29,308,692 | 168,543,285 | 5.7x | |
| TikTok | 18,328,101 | 69,435,028 | 3.8x |
| YouTube | 48,270,680 | 171,150,384 | 3.5x |
| Google Maps | 7,288,256 | 19,492,849 | 2.7x |
| Roblox | 19,556,358 | 50,313,588 | 2.6x |
| Netflix | 6,954,460 | 15,293,383 | 2.2x |
| X | 10,894,425 | 23,546,887 | 2.2x |
| Uber | 16,463,760 | 19,287,517 | 1.2x |
| Spotify | 41,182,369 | 36,002,035 | 0.87x (iOS higher) |
| PayPal | 6,298,574 | 3,704,948 | 0.59x (iOS higher) |
| Amazon Shopping | 8,415,271 | 4,631,711 | 0.55x (iOS higher) |
| DoorDash | 22,757,804 | 6,075,766 | 0.27x (iOS higher) |
Source: same 18 apps, live-verified individually on both stores (Crawlora, 2026-07-26/27) — see "How we did this" for why individual verification mattered here.
The four that flip the pattern
Every messaging and social app above skews Android. But DoorDash, Amazon Shopping, PayPal, and — just barely — Spotify all buck the trend and have more ratings on iOS:
more ratings on iOS than Android
more ratings on iOS than Android
more ratings on iOS than Android
more ratings on iOS than Android — near parity
These aren't a random draw. DoorDash and Uber (which sits at near-parity, 1.2x, rather than flipping outright) are both gig-economy apps whose current business is heavily US-weighted. Amazon Shopping and PayPal are US-founded commerce infrastructure with outsized US usage relative to their global footprint. Spotify is the outlier of the group — a genuinely global product — but its European and Latin American growth has leaned Android while its earliest, most loyal fanbase skews the US and UK, both iPhone-heavy markets.
Why the gap exists
The pattern lines up with a real, well-documented fact about the two platforms. Globally, Android runs about 73% of active phones versus iOS's roughly 27%. Flip to the US alone and the picture reverses: iPhone holds about 58% of the market versus Android's 42% (Backlinko/StatCounter, Nov. 2025).
An app built for global, cross-border communication — WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger — draws its rating volume from a worldwide, Android-majority user base, so the Android count runs far ahead. An app built around US gig work, US bank rails, or US retail draws its rating volume from a market where the phone in more pockets is an iPhone, so the gap shrinks or flips. Telegram is the extreme case for a second reason on top of the market-share story: it's historically light on in-app rating prompts compared to WhatsApp or Messenger, and its heaviest usage skews regions (Russia, Iran, Central Asia, parts of Europe) that are both Android-heavy and outside the US storefront we measured — both effects point the same direction, which is likely why its ratio is an outlier even among the Android-skewed group.
The bottom line
There is no single "most-rated app in the world" — there are two, and which one you get depends entirely on which store you check. WhatsApp's 240 million Google Play ratings dwarf anything on the App Store; YouTube's 48 million App Store ratings don't come close to cracking Android's top five. The gap between the same app's two counts is not noise — it tracks something real about where that app's users actually live and which phone they carry, and for a handful of very US-centric products, it runs the other way entirely.
How we did this (and the caveats)
We pulled bulk rating-count rankings from Crawlora's App Store and Google Play datasets, then individually re-verified every app named in this piece with a live, single-app lookup on the matching storefront before treating any number as final. That second step mattered: the bulk App Store pull we started from was missing or badly under-ranking several of the largest apps in the world — Instagram, Facebook, Spotify, Uber, and YouTube all had to be recovered by hand — while the equivalent Google Play pull matched live verification exactly for every app we spot-checked. We flag this because any future ranking built from a bulk App Store rating-count query, ours or anyone else's, should re-verify its biggest entries individually rather than trust the bulk sort.
Other limits, plainly stated. US storefront only — a global app's true worldwide rating count is higher than what we report, and the gap could look different from another country's storefront. A single snapshot (2026-07-26/27) — rating counts only grow, so treat these as a point-in-time reading, not a live figure. Rating count is a scale-and-longevity metric, not a satisfaction score — a 2010 app will always out-rate a 2023 app of equal quality, and Apple's rating-prompt UX (which asks more assertively than Google's) can inflate iOS counts relative to actual usage for some apps; that's part of why Telegram and WhatsApp diverge so sharply even though both are old, huge, cross-border messaging apps. Read the count next to the star score, not instead of it. And this is not an exhaustive census — we verified a few dozen of the largest, most recognizable consumer apps, not every app in either store; a systematic, ratio-ranked study across hundreds of apps is the natural follow-up.
Pull live App Store and Google Play data as clean JSON
Crawlora turns both app stores — ratings, rankings, reviews, categories — into normalized JSON, no scraping or anti-bot handling required. 2,000 free credits a month, no card.
Frequently asked questions
What is the most-rated app in the world?
It depends which store you check, and the two disagree. On Google Play, WhatsApp is the most-rated app by a wide margin, with about 240 million all-time ratings on the US storefront — roughly 30% more than #2, Facebook, at 184 million. On the App Store, the leader is a different app entirely: YouTube, with 48.3 million ratings, which doesn't even crack Google Play's top five.
Why are Google Play rating counts so much higher than App Store counts for the same app?
Mostly market share. Android runs about 73% of phones worldwide versus iOS's 27%, so a globally-used app like WhatsApp or Telegram racks up most of its ratings from a much larger, Android-majority user base. The gap varies enormously by app — from near 1:1 (Uber, 1.2x) to 62x (Telegram) in the apps we checked — and it isn't only market share: Apple's rating-prompt UX is also more assertive than Google's, which can inflate iOS counts relative to actual usage for some apps.
Which apps have more ratings on iPhone than Android?
Among the apps we checked, four: DoorDash (3.7x more ratings on iOS), Amazon Shopping (1.8x), PayPal (1.7x), and Spotify (about 1.15x, close to even). All four skew toward US-centric commerce or gig work, which lines up with iPhone's roughly 58% US market share versus Android's 42% — the opposite of the global split.
Does a high rating count mean an app is good?
Not by itself. Rating count mostly measures scale and time live — an app from 2010 will always out-rate an equally good app from 2023, and it says nothing about how happy users currently are. Pair it with the star score (or better, a recent-reviews sample) rather than reading rating count as a satisfaction verdict.
How was this data collected?
We pulled bulk rating-count rankings from Crawlora's App Store and Google Play datasets (US storefront, 2026-07-26/27), then individually re-verified every app named in the piece with a live, single-app API lookup on the matching store before treating a number as final. That step mattered: the bulk App Store pull was missing or under-ranking several of the world's largest apps (Instagram, Facebook, Spotify, Uber, YouTube), while the equivalent Google Play pull matched live verification exactly.