The Smallest Highly Rated App

What 102 Reviewers Actually Say

Tao Te Ching Lao Tzu sits at the top of Tiny But Loved at a mere 417 KB, small enough that you could tuck several copies inside the app ranked just below it. The leaderboard itself looks neat and orderly. The 102 reviews underneath it tell a rougher story. Sentiment is down at 0.45 right now, and rather than stabilizing, it keeps drifting lower. Reviewers keep coming back to the same handful of words: translations, app update, navigation, ease of use, bookmarks. The gripe is pointed: a recent update stripped out translation options and brought in new errors, and users clocked it fast. Yet some reviewers still praise the app for being simple and easy to navigate. Both things can be true of the same app, at the same time.

The top spot isn't going anywhere. The warmth people feel toward the app underneath that spot is. That's the part of this board worth paying attention to.

The Drop From #1, and the Long Tail

Starling Home Hub just cracked the top ten and lands at #2, weighing in at 634 KB. That's a sizable jump from the leader, but it's nothing compared to what comes after: Background Eraser Pro sits at #3 (787 KB), Poll Everywhere at #4 (1,018 KB), Fliqlo at #5 (1.1 MB). From there the file sizes take off. By #100, the heaviest app on the whole board hits 5.7 MB, while the leader's footprint comes in at just 0.1× the median across the top 100. This isn't a tight contest between small and slightly smaller. It's a cliff edge.

Two developers manage to break the one-app-per-spot pattern. Thomas Tsopanakis turns up five separate times in the top 100, including Percentages Calculator at #14 and SMS Templates - Text Messages at #22. handyCloset Inc. shows up twice, with Background Eraser Pro at #3 and PhotoLayers Pro at #12. That's not a fluke. It reads like a developer who cracked the code on what "tiny and loved" means here, and kept building with that in mind.

One Change in 113 Days

The top spot has only changed hands once across the whole window we've tracked, moving from Goblin Tools to Tao Te Ching Lao Tzu back in July 2026. It hasn't moved since, not once, across all 113 days we've watched it. Average movement inside the top ten over that same stretch is just 0.6 places, which makes this one of the quietest leaderboards on the whole site. But rank stability and how people actually feel about an app aren't the same thing, and right now this board is proving that the hard way.

A file this small, holding onto the top spot this long, while the people actually using it grow a bit less enthusiastic with every update: that's the real story here, not the file size.