How Alike Is Each Country's App Store?

The closest match we found is Canada and United States, with free charts that overlap by 46%. The same apps show up, mostly in the same order too. English-speaking and Western European markets tend to cluster like this, since they share a language, similar incomes, and the same handful of global app companies. Their charts end up looking like small variations on one shared list. Look at the US top 100 and you have basically already seen most of Canada's.

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 anyone else. The least similar pair in our set, China and Russia, share just 0% of their charts. China comes out as the most distinctive storefront overall, with a top 100 that looks unlike any other country's list. That gap points to a local app ecosystem built around home-grown super-apps, where global titles barely register. In these markets, "what's popular" means something else entirely.

Set aside the two-country comparisons for a moment and ask a bigger question instead: how many apps actually show up everywhere? Across all 25 charts we track, there are 1,369 distinct apps sitting somewhere in the free top 100s, and not a single one appears in every country. Only 17 manage to land in at least 80% of them. At the opposite extreme, 1,177 apps (86%) chart in exactly one country and nowhere else. So the "global" App Store is really just 25 separate local charts, held together by a pretty thin common thread.

The apps that get closest to true universality are the ones you'd probably guess. Threads and Google both chart in 24 of 25 countries, alongside a few other Google products: a messaging app, a search engine, a maps app, the kind of tools that don't really face serious local competition anywhere. Everything that ranks below them starts to look like a local story rather than a global one.

Averaging each country's overlap with all the others gives a single "typicality" score — how closely a storefront resembles the global mean. Spain tops it at 22.7%, trailed by the US and UK: these are the anchor markets whose charts define what "normal" looks like, so of course they sit nearest the centre. The bottom of the ranking is the more interesting end. China scores just 0.6%, with Russia and South Korea not far above it. A low score here is not noise — it is a coherent local chart built almost entirely on apps the rest of the world never 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.