Longest Continuous Run

One Day

A single day separates first and second place on this board. Holy Bible, by Paul Avery, sits at 17 yrs 357 d. Apartment Guide Home Rentals, by Rent Group Inc., follows at 17 yrs 356 d. Both apps have logged more than seventeen years of updates, and one day of continuous history is all that separates them. You'd expect that kind of margin on a weekly leaderboard, not on something measured in decades.

This same board has changed hands 17 times over the 69 days we've tracked it, and Holy Bible has held the top spot for only 7 of those days. A seventeen-year run can slip to second place overnight if the app behind it ships an update one day sooner. Over the tracking window, the average top-ten app has moved 3.7 places, a lot of movement for a ranking built on years of history.

The Shape of the Top 100

Past the top two, the drop-off flattens out. i41CX, by Antonio Lagana, holds third at 17 yrs 350 d, seven days behind the leader. PokerCruncher - Advanced Odds and BigOven Recipes & Meal Planner are tied at 17 yrs 338 d. HotSchedules, Google Earth, Speaker Polarity, and iFR Cockpit all land on the exact same number, 17 yrs 336 d, a four-way tie sitting in the middle of the pack. Rank one hundred sits at 17 yrs 248 d, so the span from top to bottom narrows to roughly 109 days across the entire top 100. For a board spanning nearly two decades of app history, that's a remarkably tight band.

Google Earth is the odd name out here. Most of this list is small, single-purpose software: period trackers, banking apps, a poker odds calculator, and a lunar calendar app called 通勝萬年曆, from Firm 13 Limited. Google Earth is a mass-market product from a company the size of Google, sitting next to apps built by one or two people. Long update histories aren't only a small-developer trait. Big companies keep old apps running too. They rarely dominate a board like this one.

St.George Bank Limited turns up twice, with St.George Mobile Banking and BankSA Mobile Banking landing five places apart. Ultralingua, Inc. shows up five separate times in the top 100, more than any other developer on the list. The company has kept several language products running side by side for close to two decades, a feat no one else here has managed.

What Users Actually Report

Across 100 reviews of Holy Bible, sentiment sits at 0.68 and has stayed fairly steady. Reviewers praise its simplicity and the lack of distractions, which fits an app whose entire job is getting out of the way of the text. Complaints center on updates, bugs, and navigation, the kind of friction you'd expect after seventeen years of small changes stacked on top of each other.

The Real Story

Seventeen years of updates sounds like permanence, but the one-day margin at the top tells a different story: this board runs on a photo finish.