Tony Wang14 min readTop Free & Top Paid Apps Right Now: App Store vs. Google Play (2026)
Today's top free and paid app charts on the App Store and Google Play: ChatGPT leads Android free, App Store paid is 80% games, Android paid is 0% games.
Which app is #1 right now? It depends which store, and which chart, you're asking about. On the US App Store's free chart today, the top spot is a Netflix game-controller app, not ChatGPT — ChatGPT is #3. On Google Play, ChatGPT is #1. On the paid charts the split is starker: the App Store's top 20 is 80% games; Google Play's top 20 paid chart doesn't contain a single game. Below are the full top-20 rankings for Top Free and Top Paid, on both the App Store and Google Play, US storefront, pulled live — plus what the category mix in each says about how free and paid apps actually make money.
Top Free Apps
App Store — Top 20 Free (US)
| # | App | Developer | Category |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Netflix Game Controller | Netflix, Inc. | Entertainment |
| 2 | TikTok Pro - Events | TikTok Ltd. | Entertainment |
| 3 | ChatGPT | OpenAI OpCo, LLC | Productivity |
| 4 | DramaBox - Stream Drama Shorts | STORYMATRIX PTE. LTD. | Entertainment |
| 5 | Depop - Buy & Sell Clothes | Depop Ltd | Shopping |
| 6 | Threads | Instagram, Inc. | Social Networking |
| 7 | Vinted: Pre-loved marketplace | Vinted Limited | Shopping |
| 8 | Claude by Anthropic | Anthropic PBC | Productivity |
| 9 | Google Gemini | Productivity | |
| 10 | CapCut: Photo & Video Editor | Bytedance Pte. Ltd | Photo & Video |
| 11 | Utilities | ||
| 12 | Whatnot: Shop, Sell, Connect | Whatnot Inc. | Shopping |
| 13 | Temu: Shop Like a Billionaire | Temu | Shopping |
| 14 | SHEIN - Shopping Online | ROADGET BUSINESS PTE. LTD. | Shopping |
| 15 | WhatsApp Messenger | WhatsApp Inc. | Social Networking |
| 16 | Freecash - Get Paid Real Money | Freecash | Entertainment |
| 17 | DealSeek: Coupons & Discounts | DealSeek LLC | Shopping |
| 18 | DoorDash: Food, Grocery, More | DoorDash, Inc. | Food & Drink |
| 19 | Google Maps | Navigation | |
| 20 | X | X Corp. | News |
Google Play — Top 20 Free (US)
| # | App | Developer |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | ChatGPT | OpenAI |
| 2 | PineDrama - Short Dramas | TikTok Pte. Ltd. |
| 3 | TikTok Pro - Events | TikTok Pte. Ltd. |
| 4 | TikTok - Videos, Shop & LIVE | TikTok Pte. Ltd. |
| 5 | WhatsApp Messenger | WhatsApp LLC |
| 6 | DramaBox - Stream Drama Shorts | STORYMATRIX |
| 7 | PDF Reader - File Manager | Gawiii.App |
| 8 | ||
| 9 | Cash App | Block, Inc. |
| 10 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | |
| 11 | TikTok Lite - Faster TikTok | TikTok Pte. Ltd. |
| 12 | Meta AI | Meta Platforms, Inc. |
| 13 | PDF Reader & Document Viewer | Meagan McConnell |
| 14 | Temu: Shop Like a Billionaire | Temu |
| 15 | X | X Corp. |
| 16 | Snapchat | Snap Inc |
| 17 | Messenger | Meta Platforms, Inc. |
| 18 | Depop - Buy & Sell Clothes | Depop |
| 19 | SHEIN-Shopping Online | Roadget Business PTE. LTD. |
| 20 | CapCut - Video Editor | Bytedance Pte. Ltd. |
Overlap between the two free charts is smaller than you'd guess: only ChatGPT, TikTok Pro - Events, DramaBox, Temu, Depop and SHEIN appear on both top-20s. Threads and WhatsApp make the App Store's list; Instagram, Facebook, X, Snapchat and Messenger make Google Play's instead — Meta's whole family shows up on Android's chart but only two of its apps crack iOS's.
Top Paid Apps
App Store — Top 20 Paid (US)
| # | App | Developer | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Minecraft: Play with Friends! | Mojang | $6.99 |
| 2 | Heads Up! | Warner Bros. | $1.99 |
| 3 | Red's First Flight | Rovio Entertainment Oyj | $0.99 |
| 4 | Plague Inc. | Ndemic Creations | $0.99 |
| 5 | Shadowrocket | Shadow Launch Technology Limited | $2.99 |
| 6 | Geometry Dash | RobTop Games AB | $3.99 |
| 7 | Bloons TD 6 | Ninja Kiwi | $6.99 |
| 8 | HotSchedules | HotSchedules | $2.99 |
| 9 | Stardew Valley | ConcernedApe | $4.99 |
| 10 | SpongeBob SquarePants | HandyGames | $0.49 |
| 11 | MONOPOLY: The Board Game | Marmalade Game Studio | $4.99 |
| 12 | Balatro | Playstack Ltd | $9.99 |
| 13 | AnkiMobile Flashcards | Anki Software, LLC | $24.99 |
| 14 | Papa's Freezeria To Go! | Flipline Studios | $0.99 |
| 15 | Wreckfest | HandyGames | $0.49 |
| 16 | Scritchy Scratchy | Funday Games ApS | $6.99 |
| 17 | Procreate Pocket | Savage Interactive Pty Ltd | $5.99 |
| 18 | Earn to Die 2 | Not Doppler | $0.29 |
| 19 | Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas | Rockstar Games | $6.99 |
| 20 | Slay the Spire | Balor Games | $9.99 |
Google Play — Top 20 Paid (US)
| # | App | Developer | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | HotSchedules | Fourth Enterprises, LLC | $2.99 |
| 2 | FL Studio Mobile | Image-Line | $14.99 |
| 3 | TonalEnergy Tuner & Metronome | TonalEnergy, Inc | $5.99 |
| 4 | Torque Pro (OBD 2 & Car) | Ian Hawkins | $4.95 |
| 5 | Tasker | joaomgcd | $4.49 |
| 6 | Glass Widgets | AppsLab Co. | $0.89 |
| 7 | Game Booster 4x Faster Pro | G19 Mobile | $0.29 |
| 8 | Spirit Talker ® | Spotted: Ghosts | $5.49 |
| 9 | ZKin Watch Smooth Machinery | ZKin | $2.99 |
| 10 | PXPlay: Remote Play | GF Frame Technologies | $6.99 |
| 11 | Fallout Pip-Boy SE Watch Face | Facer Studios | $1.99 |
| 12 | MD339 Digital watch face | Matteo Dini MD ® Watch Faces | $2.99 |
| 13 | tvQuickActions Pro | tvDev | $3.99 |
| 14 | Fluffy OneUi Icons | Leaf Designs | $0.99 |
| 15 | AlfaOBD | AlfaOBD Autodiag | $49.00 |
| 16 | LiveATC for Android | LiveATC | $3.99 |
| 17 | NFC Tools - Pro Edition | wakdev | $3.99 |
| 18 | Monash University FODMAP diet | Monash University Low FODMAP diet team | $9.00 |
| 19 | Nixie Digital - Wear OS Face | Inspire Watch | $1.99 |
| 20 | PER32 Ultra Hybrid Watch Face | PERSONA Watch Face | $2.99 |
Not one title overlaps between the two paid charts. That's the headline: the App Store's paid chart and Google Play's paid chart are effectively different markets, not two views of the same one.
What's driving the free list vs. the paid list
Tag every app above by what it actually is, and a clean pattern falls out: free charts are led by AI, social, shopping and short video; paid charts are led by games on one platform and utilities on the other.
Flip to the paid charts and the picture inverts — and splits hard by platform:
16 of 20 are games — Minecraft, GTA: San Andreas, Balatro, Bloons TD 6…
0 of 20 are games — every slot is a utility, tool or watch face
Google Play's paid chart isn't just game-free — 7 of its 20 slots (35%) are watch faces or home-screen personalization (Glass Widgets, ZKin Watch Smooth Machinery, Fallout Pip-Boy SE Watch Face, MD339 Digital, Fluffy OneUi Icons, Nixie Digital, PER32 Ultra Hybrid), and most of the rest are single-purpose tools people pay once for and keep forever: a scheduling app (HotSchedules), a DAW (FL Studio Mobile), a car-diagnostic reader (Torque Pro), an automation engine (Tasker), an NFC toolkit. Pricing tracks that split too — App Store paid apps average $5.26 (median $4.49); Google Play paid apps average $6.55 (median $3.99, pulled up by AlfaOBD's $49 professional diagnostic tool — drop that one outlier and the Android average falls to $4.35, below iOS's).
Methodology and caveats
We pulled all four charts live through Crawlora's App Store and Google Play list endpoints (US storefront, unfiltered "Top Free"/"Top Paid" collection, no category filter — Apple's topfreeapplications/toppaidapplications and Google's TOP_FREE/TOP_PAID). Category tags in the analysis section are ours: for the App Store we used Apple's own genre field on each listing; Google Play's list response doesn't return a category, so those tags are assigned by hand from the app's name and developer, the same way we'd read the chart by eye. Treat that classification as a reasonable read, not an authoritative taxonomy — a few calls (is "Freecash" entertainment or finance? is "CapCut" photo/video or social?) are judgment calls.
A rankings snapshot is a moving target. App Store and Google Play charts move continuously — a free game promo, a viral TikTok trend, or a new AI model release can reshuffle the top 20 within hours. Treat every rank above as "as of the pull," not a stable fact.
The real gotcha, and the one worth documenting carefully: Google Play's list endpoint returned a different national storefront on identical, back-to-back requests. Calling it repeatedly with the exact same parameters (Collection=TOP_PAID, Category=APPLICATION, Country=US) returned, across five consecutive calls: EUR-priced French/European apps, GBP-priced UK apps, KRW-priced Korean apps, an empty result, and finally the correct USD-priced US chart — with no pattern tied to whether Country was sent as US or us. We had expected (going in) a clean case-sensitivity bug — uppercase working, lowercase silently falling through to a different storefront — but that didn't hold up under repeat testing: both cases returned the correct US/USD chart on some calls and a wrong storefront on others, on both TOP_FREE and TOP_PAID collections, not just TOP_PAID. Apple's appstore_list endpoint, pulled the same number of times with the same parameters, was perfectly consistent every time. The practical fix isn't a casing rule — it's to check the currency (and, if present, price) field of whatever comes back before trusting it as the storefront you asked for, and retry the call if it doesn't match, rather than assuming the request parameters alone guarantee the response's locale. The tables above are the first calls in each direction that came back with the correct US/USD data, confirmed row by row.
We also cross-checked datasets_apps_charts_search (the queryable version of the same chart data) as a second source; its category filter does not isolate the overall/unfiltered chart when left empty — it instead interleaves rank-1 entries across every category and device combination, which looks superficially like a top-20 list but isn't one. For a clean, unfiltered "what's actually #1 overall" list, calling appstore_list/googleplay_list directly with no category slicing is the reliable path; we used that path for every ranking on this page.
If you're wondering how we pulled four live, rate-limited store charts without getting blocked: that's the day job. Crawlora is a web-data API for AI agents and pipelines that returns normalized JSON for the App Store, Google Play, search engines, marketplaces and social platforms — handling proxies, rendering and anti-bot — and bills pay-on-success. The same approach powers our AI apps on the App Store study, our Product Hunt trends study, and our streaming fragmentation study — and the full app catalog behind this page, 4.1M apps across the App Store and Google Play, is browsable in our mobile app dataset, with the daily App Store + Google Play charts and app-review sentiment as their own queryable datasets.
Pull today's charts yourself
Every table on this page came straight from Crawlora's structured App Store and Google Play endpoints. Pull top charts, app details, and reviews as normalized JSON — proxies, rendering, and anti-bot handled, billed pay-on-success. 2,000 free credits a month, no card.
Frequently asked questions
What is the #1 free app right now?
It depends on the store. On Google Play (US), ChatGPT is #1 free. On the App Store (US), the top spot currently belongs to Netflix's Game Controller app, with ChatGPT at #3 behind a TikTok live-events app. The two stores' free charts overlap on only six of forty combined slots.
What is the #1 paid app right now?
On the App Store (US), Minecraft: Play with Friends! is #1 paid at $6.99. On Google Play (US), HotSchedules — a restaurant/retail staff-scheduling app — is #1 paid at $2.99. The two paid charts share zero titles: iOS's top 20 paid is 80% games, Android's top 20 paid has none.
Are the App Store and Google Play top charts the same apps?
No, and less than you'd expect. Of the top-20 free apps on each store, only six titles appear on both (ChatGPT, TikTok Pro - Events, DramaBox, Temu, Depop, SHEIN). The top-20 paid charts don't overlap at all — the App Store's is nearly all games, Google Play's is entirely non-game utilities and watch faces.
Why is Google Play's paid chart full of watch faces and utilities instead of games?
In our pull, 7 of Google Play's top 20 paid apps (35%) were watch-face or home-screen personalization apps (Glass Widgets, ZKin Watch, Fallout Pip-Boy SE Watch Face, and others), and most of the rest were single-purpose tools like HotSchedules, FL Studio Mobile, and Torque Pro. Not one was a game. The App Store's paid chart, pulled the same way, was 80% games — the two platforms' paid-app buyers behave very differently, at least on this snapshot.
How many apps in the free charts are AI apps?
Five of the 40 combined top-20-free slots (12.5%) are AI assistants: ChatGPT and Meta AI on Google Play, and ChatGPT, Claude, and Google Gemini on the App Store. Shopping apps (Depop, Vinted, Whatnot, Temu, SHEIN, DealSeek) outnumber them, holding 9 of the 40 slots.
How was this measured, and how current is it?
We pulled all four charts live through Crawlora's App Store and Google Play list endpoints (US storefront, unfiltered Top Free / Top Paid collections, no category filter) — the same overall chart Apple and Google show on their own store fronts. App charts move continuously, so treat every rank as a snapshot at the time of the pull, not a stable fact; category tags in the analysis are ours, hand-assigned from each app's name, developer, and (App Store only) Apple's own genre field.
Is Google Play's list API reliable for the correct country?
Not consistently, in our testing. Identical, back-to-back calls to Google Play's list endpoint for the same collection and Country parameter returned five different national storefronts across five calls (US, France, UK, South Korea, Singapore) — with no pattern tied to whether the country code was sent uppercase or lowercase, and on both the TOP_FREE and TOP_PAID collections, not just one. Apple's equivalent App Store endpoint was consistent on every call. The fix is to check the currency field of the response before trusting it, and retry if it doesn't match what you requested.