The Oldest Survivor

A Six-Way Tie at the Top

Look at positions one through six and you'll notice something strange right off the bat: nothing separates these apps at all. Apartment Guide Home Rentals, Collins Spanish-English, Collins German-English, Collins Italian-English, Collins-Robert Concise, and Collins English all share the exact same original release year, 2008. When six apps land on one identical value, it means whatever ranking sits above them isn't tracking age anymore, not in any meaningful way. The site has to break the tie some other way. So most of that top ten reads less like a real hierarchy and more like a photo finish.

That's why the board feels so unsteady even though the underlying number never moves an inch. A 2008 app simply can't outlast another 2008 app on age alone. What you're watching play out is mostly tie-break noise, not genuine movement.

One Developer, Five Seats

Ultralingua, Inc. owns five of the top ten slots outright: Collins Spanish-English, Collins German-English, Collins Italian-English, Collins-Robert Concise, and Collins English. A single dictionary publisher from the App Store's earliest days grabbed nearly the whole tied 2008 cluster for itself, and here they are, still shipping updates across five separate language products a decade and a half on. That says a lot less about any individual app's popularity and a lot more about a publisher who simply refuses to let its software rot.

The apps worth actually paying attention to are the ones that break this pattern. Apartment Guide Home Rentals, a real-estate listings app with absolutely no connection to language tools, now sits at #1. iHarmony, Juxtaposer, NewsTap, and Call Checker round out the rest of the top ten: a dating-adjacent app, a photo editor, a Usenet newsreader, and a caller-ID utility. None of them belong to Ultralingua, and none of them are tied to each other either. They're just old apps whose developers never stopped maintaining them. Scroll from #1 down to #100 and you keep bumping into these 2008-era survivors, but that shared Collins identity vanishes the second you step outside the cluster.

A Crown That Won't Sit Still

The #1 spot has changed hands 7 times over the tracked period. Collins Spanish-English shares a release year with half the field ranked above it, yet it only managed to hold the top spot for 4 of the last 17 days before Apartment Guide Home Rentals knocked it off in July 2026. Collins Spanish-English barely got comfortable up there. It entered straight at #1 and was gone again almost as fast.

Average movement across the top ten works out to 5 places over the tracked window, which is a surprising amount of churn for a board whose core measurement, a year frozen at 2008, doesn't budge at all. The apps themselves aren't getting older or younger. What's actually shifting is which qualifying update timestamp happens to edge out another, or however the site chooses to settle disputes between apps that are, on paper, identically old.