The Oldest Survivor

Five Dictionaries, One Publisher

No maker on this board matches what ranks three through eight pull off. Ultralingua, Inc. owns five of the top eight spots, and every single one carries a 2008 date: Collins Spanish-English at #3, Collins German-English at #5, Collins Italian-English at #6, Collins-Robert Concise at #7, and Collins English at #8. One publisher, one year, five apps that are somehow still getting updates almost two decades on.

Nowhere else in the top 25 do you see that kind of concentration. Ultralingua put out a small fleet of language dictionaries in the App Store's opening year and just kept them all alive. That's not luck. That's years of someone actually maintaining the code.

The New Number One, and What It Took to Get There

John Coddington's Complex RPN Calculator, originally released in 2008, now holds #1. It knocked Apartment Guide Home Rentals (Rent Group Inc.) off the top in August 2026, and it did so by parachuting straight into the top ten rather than working its way up. The crown itself has changed hands 8 times over the tracked period, and Complex RPN Calculator has only held #1 for 14 of the last 45 days, under a third of that stretch. Call it a lead, not a reign.

The reviews only muddy the picture more. Out of 67 reviews, sentiment sits at a mixed 0.15 and is still sliding, with the same complaint surfacing again and again: the app crashes on newer versions of iOS. A few people still swear by the RPN functionality when it actually works, but the gripes about the interface and the documentation keep piling up alongside the praise. Watching an app from 2008 wrestle with modern iOS just to stay standing is its own kind of survival story.

Tied at the Top, and the Entry That Doesn't Fit

Here's something easy to miss on a quick pass: every single app in the top 25 lists the same year, 2008. There's no numeric daylight between #1 and #2, or even between #1 and #25, because the board only shows the year, and that year is identical straight down the list. So whatever actually separates Complex RPN Calculator from Apartment Guide Home Rentals has to live in a finer-grained date that this board simply doesn't display. The ranking still holds up, even though the gap you'd expect to see is nowhere to be found.

And yet the board keeps churning while the years sit frozen in place. Average movement among the top ten runs 8 places across the tracked window, which gives you a fast-shuffling leaderboard built entirely on apps stamped 2008, swapping seats as if the whole thing were happening live.

Then there's #22: 易仙AI八字【2026年运程】 by CHEUNG PUI MAN, a fortune-telling app whose own name promises predictions for 2026, yet it's listed here with an original release year of 2008. Eighteen years sit between when the app was born and the year it claims to be forecasting, which makes it the one entry on this list that breaks the pattern instead of confirming it.

What This Board Actually Rewards

This board isn't measuring quality, and Complex RPN Calculator proves it just by sitting at #1 while its sentiment keeps dropping. Surviving eighteen years of iOS updates and actually being liked by the people using your app right now are two different achievements, and only one of them shows up here. Ultralingua earned its five slots the slow way, through quiet, steady maintenance. Complex RPN Calculator earned its one slot through timing and a metadata date. The board scores those two things identically. You don't have to.