Tiny But Loved

What the Reviews Actually Say

Tao Te Ching Lao Tzu holds #1 on Tiny But Loved at just 417 KB, and it hasn't budged in 45 straight days of tracking. But the reviews paint a messier picture than that steady ranking suggests. Sentiment across the last 100 reviews has fallen to 0.30, and it's still sliding. Translations keep coming up as a sore point, mostly because they're gone: recent updates dropped several language versions, and the same complaints about functionality, navigation, content, and interface keep resurfacing. That's not the pattern you'd expect from an app running on pure goodwill.

You wouldn't expect an app rated 4.7-and-above with over a thousand ratings to be pulling reviews this sour, but that's exactly what's happening. The board isn't reacting to this week's mood, though. It's built on an average accumulated over a much longer stretch, and that older average is what locked in the spot. Even so, the reviews landing now suggest cracks are starting to show underneath it.

The Real Shape of the Top 100

Size drives everything on this board, and the gap between the top and bottom of the list is enormous. It runs from 417 KB at #1 all the way to 5.6 MB at #100, which means the app on top is only about 0.1 times the median size across all hundred entries. Starling Home Hub, a fresh face in the top ten now sitting at #2, comes in at 634 KB and is already pulling ahead of everything below it. Background Eraser Pro (#3, 787 KB) and Poll Everywhere (#4, 1,022 KB) both cross the megabyte line early, and by the time you reach #16, Percentages Calculator at 2.0 MB, you're looking at something nearly five times the weight of whatever sits at #1.

Two developers manage to land two apps apiece in this stretch. handyCloset Inc. has Background Eraser Pro at #3 and PhotoLayers Pro at #14, both photo-editing tools clearly built to stay small. Thomas Tsopanakis also shows up twice, with Percentages Calculator at #16 and SMS Templates - Text Messages at #23, two lean utilities from the same maker. Apple appears 7 times across the top 100, which says a lot about what a big company can do with an app's footprint when it actually cares to trim it. The real anomaly here is Starling Home Hub. There's no obvious reason a smart-home hub companion app should be this compact, yet it sits at #2, beating out dozens of narrow, single-purpose utilities that arguably have an easier time staying tiny.

One Change, Then Nothing

The top spot has flipped exactly once across everything we've tracked, back in July 2026, when Tao Te Ching Lao Tzu took it from Goblin Tools. Since then, nothing has moved. Within the top ten as a whole, the average shift is only about 0.6 places. This isn't a board where apps climb week over week through effort.

Line that stillness up against the review numbers and a clearer story emerges. The app camped at the top for 45 straight days is also, right now, the one its own users seem least happy with. Nothing dislodges it because the ranking rewards a long-built average, not this week's complaints about vanished translations. So yes, it's tiny and loved, technically. Whether it's actually loved at this exact moment is a different question entirely.