The Biggest Free App

Seven Entries, One Publisher

网易移动游戏 turns up seven separate times in this top 100, and yet not one of those seven entries lands in the top ten shown above.

WARGAMING and Apple own the headline slots, sure, but one Chinese publisher has quietly stuffed seven download-heavy titles into the ranks just beneath them. That kind of repetition usually means the same bloated engine gets reused across a whole lineup of games, not one lucky breakout hit. No other developer repeats at anywhere near that scale, and honestly, you'd never catch it if you only skimmed the top ten.

The Actual Giant

World of Tanks Blitz PVP, from WARGAMING Group Limited, sits at #1 with 18.8 GB, bigger than a full macOS installer. It only just cracked the top ten, which is a bit strange since apps this size tend to balloon gradually over years rather than show up already wearing the crown.

macOS Big Sur, at 11.7 GB, used to hold that top spot. Now the gap between #1 and #2 runs 7.1 GB, so a WARGAMING tank game outweighs an entire operating system by more than half its own size. Asphalt Legends: Racing Game from Gameloft (7.9 GB) and Assassin's Creed Mirage from Ubisoft (6.0 GB) fill out the next tier, both the kind of racing and open-world titles that eat storage alive for textures. Neither one gets close to catching the leader.

The Shape Of The List

The board stretches from that 18.8 GB leader all the way down to 3.7 GB at #100, a spread wide enough that the median app in this top 100 is only a fifth the size of the winner, or 5.1× smaller than it. Apple's own OS installers cluster through the middle of the list too. OS X El Capitan, macOS Sierra, and macOS Catalina all sit somewhere between 4.6 and 5.8 GB, which says a lot about how Apple's supposedly free operating systems now rival console games for sheer bulk.

The real oddity here is Image Generator Local: OffGen, by Mehmet Demir, at #5 with 5.8 GB. Everything nearby comes from either a full studio or from Apple itself, but this one comes from a single named developer, standing shoulder to shoulder with Ubisoft and Gameloft purely on file size. Radex AI: Health Assistant, from Mustafa Cemil Guney, pulls off the same feat one rank down at #7 with 4.7 GB. Two solo-attributed apps have muscled their way into a list otherwise dominated by publishers with hundreds of employees on payroll.

A Crown That Doesn't Sit Still

This crown has actually changed hands seven times over the period AppWanderer has been tracking it, and World of Tanks Blitz PVP has only held the top spot for 16 of the last 43 tracked days. So calling it a lock on the position would be a stretch.

The people downloading this 18.8 GB game don't sound especially happy about it, either. Across 101 reviews, sentiment sits at -0.35 and keeps drifting lower, with recurring gripes about pay-to-win mechanics and poor matchmaking, though a fair number of players still say it's fun. The biggest free download on the App Store right now happens to be one its own users are souring on, which just goes to show that free and good aren't the same thing here.