Quick answer

A rating count is not a popularity score. It is a record of how often an app got to ask a user for a rating, multiplied by how many users it already had installed. That distinction is the whole game. Meowdoku, listed on the App Store as Meowdoku!, is a daily puzzle barely a month old, and it currently tops AppWanderer's Youngest Hit App board for rating count among apps under 30 days old, out of 2,394 that qualified. Impressive on paper. But before you let that number steer what you download tonight, understand the machinery underneath it: a review prompt that fires on a cadence, an install base that was already there, and an Apple-imposed ceiling on how many times that pop-up can appear to any one person no matter how aggressively the app's code asks. Change the category and the same machinery would produce the same number for an app nobody particularly likes. The headline count cannot tell those two cases apart, and neither can you from the outside.

What the record actually measures

Meowdoku shipped in early 2026 as a one-round-a-day sudoku, the kind of thing you finish on a train platform, not a game you sit down with. It overtook apps that had been live for weeks, and it did that in three days. On AppWanderer's Youngest Hit App board it sits ahead of Amaze GO!, NYT Crossplay: Word Games, Smash Fest!, and Red Dead Redemption NETFLIX. The board only counts the 2,394 apps that cleared its bar, so this is not a sparse field it walked through. Here is what the record does not settle. Rating velocity has two inputs that the total quietly folds together: how often the app is allowed to prompt, and how many people are already opening it. A short daily loop scores high on the first input almost by construction. If Meowdoku also arrived with a real install base, the two inputs compound, and the count climbs at a rate that has very little to do with whether the game is any good. To separate love from mechanics you would need to know whether new ratings are tracking the number of finished sessions or just the number of first-day downloads. The board number gives you neither.

Why the cadence, not the crowd, sets the pace

Apple is explicit about the ceiling in its own developer documentation. The native prompt, driven by an API called SKStoreReviewController, can only surface for a given user a set number of times per year, and it does not matter how often the app's code requests it. That cap is the reason category, not popularity, tends to drive the count. An app built around a short, repeatable session reaches its prompt-eligible moments far sooner than one you open once a month, so it spends its yearly allotment of prompts quickly and across many more users. That is most of the explanation for a number like Meowdoku's. The count reflects how frequently the design earns a natural moment to ask, layered on top of a user base large enough to make each asking moment count. A daily puzzle manufactures those moments constantly. When the game is also genuinely good, a healthy share of prompts convert. None of that requires anything shady. It requires a habit loop and an audience, which is exactly what the category selects for. Fast, on its own, is not evidence of anything. It is what this cadence plus this crowd was always going to produce.

What a fast count leaves out

Run the mechanics against a different app and the same speed reads completely differently. Meowdoku's daily loop generates thousands of prompt-eligible moments that a one-time utility never gets near, so a count that climbs fast in its first month is the expected output, not a signal worth reading into. Now point that identical velocity at a flashlight app or a PDF scanner. Those users open the thing, use it, and leave, with no recurring moment for a prompt to fire, so a matching pace stops being ordinary and starts being a question worth asking. Which is why the raw total guarantees nothing about quality. You can install a five-star app with a five-figure rating count, find it forgettable, and discover the number told you only that many people were asked, not that many people were pleased. Real manipulation exists too, and it is a separate matter: the FTC's 2024 rule against fake and paid-for reviews targets incentivized ratings and review-gating, the manufactured kind of enthusiasm. That is a different problem from the plain fact that a sticky game gets to ask more often than a utility does. Keep the two apart, because the count alone will happily blur them together.

How to read a new app's count before you install

Picture yourself at 11 PM choosing between two apps with nearly identical ratings. Start with the category and be honest about how often you would actually open the app on a normal day, because that frequency is the same thing driving its prompt cadence. Then check whether its Top Charts position lines up with its rating count. Top Charts reflects recent download and engagement velocity, computed by Apple, and prompt frequency alone cannot inflate it the way it inflates a raw total, though a launch-week spike can still distort it. After that, weigh the app's age against how many ratings it has managed to gather. Marketers like to say the rating-to-download ratio matters more than the raw count, and they are right, but Apple publishes neither downloads nor that ratio, so everyone falls back on the one number that is visible. That is the trap. The count wins your attention because it is sitting right there on the store page, easy to screenshot and easy to drop into a headline, the same way a record board draws the eye. Treat it as a second opinion. Read the ranking first, since a chart position is harder to fake than a number the app's own prompts can pad.

The one comparison worth making

Before a rating count changes your mind about a new app, hold it up against its category's normal prompt cadence. That comparison carries more information than the total ever will. Daily puzzle and word games rack up prompts constantly, because finishing a session hands the app a natural moment to ask, so Meowdoku's place on the board reflects that mechanical reality at least as much as any genuine affection for the game. A one-time utility climbing at the same speed is telling a different story entirely, because nothing in its design should be asking that often. Skip the comparison and you will keep reading prompt frequency as popularity, with no way to tell a fast honest hit from a fast hollow one. The count measures cadence and install base. Judge it against what its category should produce, and look at the pace, not the peak.