How Alike Is Each Country's App Store?

The most alike pair we found is Canada and United States, whose free charts overlap by 44.9% — the same apps, in nearly the same order. English-speaking and Western European markets cluster tightly: they share a language, similar incomes, and the same global app companies, so their charts read like small variations on one list. If you have seen the US top 100, you have largely seen theirs.

Look at the United States chart and the drop-off hits you fast. Nearby markets like Canada share most of the same apps, while East Asian storefronts barely overlap at all. The chart below ranks every country by how much of the US top 100 turns up in its own lineup, a rough sketch of cultural and economic distance drawn entirely from app rankings.

Then there are the markets that barely resemble each other at all. The least similar pair we found, China and India, share just 0% of their charts. And the single most distinctive storefront is China, whose top 100 looks less like anyone else's list than any other market we checked. That points to a strong local app ecosystem, home grown super apps, and tastes that global titles just haven't cracked. In these markets, popularity means something else entirely.

Compare any two countries and the real question becomes pretty simple: how many apps actually make it everywhere? Across the 25 charts we track, 1,369 distinct apps turn up somewhere in the free top 100s, and not one of them appears in every country. Just 18 manage to crack at least 80% of the charts. On the opposite end, 1,177 apps (86%) chart in a single country and nowhere else. So much for a unified "global" App Store, it's really 25 separate local charts held together by a pretty thin thread.

The apps that come closest to universal are the usual suspects. Google and Threads each show up in 24 of the 25 countries, right alongside a handful of other Google products: a messaging app, a search engine, a maps app, the sort of things that barely face any real local competition anywhere. Past that small group, the story stops being global and starts being local, country by country.

Average out each country's overlap with every other country and you end up with one "typicality" score: how closely a storefront's chart lines up with the global mean. Spain comes out on top at 21.8%, with the US and UK not far behind. These are the anchor markets, the charts that set the baseline for what "normal" looks like, so finding them near the centre makes sense. The bottom of the ranking is where it gets interesting. China sits at just 1.1%, with Russia and South Korea only a bit higher. That low number isn't a fluke. Chinese users run a local chart built almost entirely around apps nobody else in the world even sees.

This data is pulled from the free top 100 lists on the days we grabbed them, so what you're looking at is a snapshot of the most volatile slice of each store, not the whole catalogue. Two charts can share an app without sharing a rank, since our overlap score just counts presence rather than position, meaning a #1 and a #98 count the same. A shared app doesn't guarantee a shared experience either, because the same title can be localized, priced, and used in totally different ways depending on which border it's charting in. The similarity numbers tell you which apps are trending together across 25 storefronts. They don't tell you why, and that part is still a local question.