The App Store launched back in July 2008, and the rules governing how apps collect ratings have changed enough since then that lining up a two year old app against a fifteen year old one won't tell you much. Facebook's App Store rating count makes the point well: it's held a spot near the top of the charts for a decade and a half, and almost no newer app has managed to close that gap. Three things drive most of it: how long an app has been on the store, how often it prompts people to leave a review, and how many people open it each day. Which of those matters most depends on the category, and also on whatever review prompt rules Apple had in place when the app first launched, since Apple has tweaked how often an app can ask for a rating over the years. If you've ever lined up your own app's numbers against Facebook's and felt deflated before you'd even shipped a first update, keep reading. Instagram, though, breaks the pattern. It arrived on the store two years after Facebook and has already overtaken it in total ratings, so age alone doesn't explain much here.
What Actually Builds a Rating Count
Age matters here, but not for the reason you'd guess. A rating total is really two numbers multiplied together: how many people open an app on a regular basis, and how many chances Apple's system gives them to actually leave a rating. Facebook checks both boxes. So does Instagram, and that's a big part of why the two sit near the top of AppWanderer's ranking of the most rated apps of all time.
Apple caps how often an app can ask through SKStoreReviewController (that's the code behind the in-app star rating pop-up) to a handful of requests per user per year. That cap showed up with iOS 10.3 in 2017, years after Facebook and Instagram had already built a running start. Before then, apps could fire off a harder prompt, one that kicked you straight out to the App Store to rate it, as often as they wanted. So the count just kept climbing, with no cap and no limit, for the better part of a decade.
Grandfathering explains part of this, but not the whole story. DoorDash launched in 2013, five years after the App Store opened, and it's still managed to climb past 22.6 million ratings, according to AppWanderer. Frequency plays a role too. A food delivery app you open three times a week racks up prompts that a static utility app just never sees.
The Most-Rated Apps in America, Right Now
AppWanderer tracks upwards of 252,000 apps on the U.S. App Store, and 62,585 of them have racked up enough reviews to make its Most Rated of All Time board. Getting onto that board takes serious volume, which is why the same handful of names keep reappearing year after year. Here's the current top five:
| Rank | App | Total Ratings |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | YouTube | 48M |
| 2 | Spotify: Music and Podcasts | 40.9M |
| 3 | 29.3M | |
| 4 | 27.2M | |
| 5 | DoorDash: Food, Grocery, More | 22.6M |
Facebook lands fourth, trailing a video platform, a music app, and its own sister app. So much for the theory that this ranking simply rewards whoever's been around longest. A rating count just tells you how many years people kept tapping an app out of habit, not whether the app is actually good, so think twice before stacking your own numbers up against these. Divide each total by roughly how long the app has been around, though, and the picture shifts. Facebook's 27.2 million ratings spread over about sixteen years works out to roughly 1.7 million a year. DoorDash's 22.6 million over about eleven years comes closer to 2 million a year, even though it launched five years later. Raw totals paper over that gap. Scale and pace, it turns out, tell two different stories.
What This Means If You're Benchmarking a Newer App
If you build apps and want to gauge your own rating count, skip Facebook, YouTube, and Spotify entirely. They're not your competition. Compare yourself to apps closer to your own age and category instead. Raw totals leave out context, and the cheap benchmarking guides never mention that, which is exactly how teams end up chasing the wrong target.
Category charts and ASO platforms (App Store Optimization tools) like Sensor Tower or data.ai already do this age-adjusted math for you, so lean on their numbers rather than eyeballing AppWanderer's top five. Pull your category's median rating count first, before you set any internal goal. Look at your app's category, how long it's actually been live, and whether people have a reason to open it every day. Then decide if a low total is really worth the panic.
Going after a Facebook-sized number with a two-year-old app just burns a planning cycle and points your team at the wrong bar entirely. This isn't some abstract warning: miss that distinction and you'll spend months measuring yourself against a product that's three generations and a decade of user habit ahead of you. Stay in your own weight class.
Where This Benchmark Breaks Down
Imagine a mobile game that won't let you see the level-up screen until you've tapped through a star-rating pop-up. Give that game eighteen months and it can outpace what an app five years old has racked up over its whole lifetime. The age-adjusted comparison above misses that entirely. This isn't a hypothetical stretched thin to make a point: a puzzle game that the App Store pushes hard in its featuring, built so almost every session ends with a rating prompt, can rack up numbers that look like a decade of organic growth squeezed into a single year. One well-timed feature placement can dump millions of new sessions on an app in a matter of days.
Time-on-market and category explain most of the gap for the ordinary stuff, your utility apps, social apps, transactional apps. But not all of it. The logic falls apart for apps built around mandatory or near-mandatory rating gates, for anything catching a seasonal spike off one cultural moment, or for that rare case where a single feature placement triggers a short-lived flood of downloads. If your app fired a rating prompt on every session during a viral month, the benchmarks above just aren't built for you.
None of this is a playbook for gaming the system. Apple already bans incentivized or manipulated reviews in its guidelines. Cases like these are rare. They're also real.
Set Your Own Benchmark
Go pull up your app's category and launch date right now, then find the median rating count for anything that matches both. This week, check whether your review-prompt logic actually follows Apple's cap, or if it's still running some outdated pattern that could get you flagged. Over the next few update cycles, track rating growth per active user instead of the raw total. That single number tells you more about retention than any comparison to Facebook ever will. A two-year-old app isn't going to look like a fifteen-year-old one, and honestly, it shouldn't. The number you've been chasing was never the right one in the first place.