The Chaos Lurking in Apple’s Most-Popular Apps List

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Apple News

At the end of every year, Apple releases a list of the most popular iPhone apps. It’s by no means a full representation of what’s going on in tech, and it’s distorted in important ways: It only tells us about companies that rely on smartphones and in some cases iPhones in particular; the list describes downloads, not overall usage, so relative newcomers (ChatGPT, Temu) rub shoulders with larger, slower-growing apps that mostly just getting re-installed or added to new devices. Still, it always tells some interesting stories. This year’s list of free apps has a few:

Photo-Illustration: Apple News

At the very top, we’ve got Temu, the direct-from-China e-commerce app that’s been growing like crazy for a while now (it was first on Apple’s list last year, too). The rise of Chinese e-commerce is all over the rankings: TikTok, which now contains a Temu-like store, ranks in third; Shein, in 12th place, is putting pressure on Amazon, which is sitting down in 20th. There seems to be a bit less heat around media streaming — YouTube is steady, Max fell from last year, and Netflix is somewhere below the list’s cutoff. Mostly, though, the story here is one of obvious megatrends and powerful, steady incumbency. Nine of the top ten apps of 2023 remained there in 2024. Meta and Google account for six apps between them and ByteDance, which owns TikTok-adjacent video editing app CapCut, has two. ChatGPT, which didn’t have an app until March of last year, is the only new addition, taking the space left by Max. Looking back at a year of tech news, there are no surprises here.

Looking forward, though, the list takes on a different quality — it’s an eerie snapshot of calm before a storm. In 2025, there’s a chance it, and the industry it represents, will get thoroughly and unpredictably scrambled in ways they haven’t in years.

Some changes are potentially imminent. The TikTok ban is currently due to go into effect in January. As implausible and strange as a total app ban sounds — and despite the broader public’s belief that it can’t actually happen — its sale or divestment is a matter of law. ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, is certainly taking the threat seriously; this week, it company asked the Supreme Court to step in on an emergency basis to block the ban, suggesting that a “modest delay” would “create breathing room for this Court to conduct an orderly review and the new administration to evaluate this matter.” The court agreed to a hearing, and TikTok CEO Shou Chew recently made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago. Donald Trump, who signed the first attempt at a TikTok ban as an executive order in 2020, has since flipped on the issue, saying that he has a “warm spot” for the app, and, suggesting that it helped him “win youth by 34 points,” which is something he very much did not do. (Other possible reasons for his flip-flop include fairly open influence-peddling.) A TikTok ban would take one of the most popular and culturally significant social platforms off the market, to the relief of Meta, Google, and maybe Snap. It would also be a boon to TikTok’s e-commerce competitors — a recent analysis of U.S. credit- and debit-card spending found that TikTok Shop recently surpassed Shein, the fast-fashion app that rocketed to popularity early in the pandemic.

One problem: Shein, like Temu, is also staring down some serious, unprecedented, and possibly imminent risks in the form of regulatory changes and tariffs. The Biden administration is already taking steps to end or revise the so-called de minimis exemption for customs fees on low-value imports, which has been extremely valuable to cross-border commerce companies like Shein. Additionally, Trump’s proposed tariffs would be particularly severe for imports from China, which account for most goods sold on these platforms. While TikTok and Shein thrived during the end of the last Trump administration and the Biden years, the problems they’re dealing with now are at least in part the delayed consequences of China policies and rhetoric that Trump advances during his first term. He may have softened on TikTok. There’s less evidence that he’s softened on trade.

Google can’t rest easy, either. It’s a substantial presence on the chart might on first glance seem bullish for the company, but there are two major problems. One is right there in front of the official Google app: ChatGPT keeps growing, and it recently expanded access to its search product, which is less of a chatbot than a stripped-down ad-free Google alternative, to anyone with a free account. So far, ChatGPT’s popularity hasn’t meaningfully corresponded, with a significant decline in Google’s market share, at least in public data. Such a shift, should it occur, would likely take a while — such basic habits take a while to break, and Google is extremely entrenched. Again, though, there’s a but: Earlier this year, the Justice Department, won a lawsuit alleging Google was a monopoly and is seeking the fairly severe and chaotic remedy of cleaving the Chrome browser from the rest of the company. The DOJ is  also seeking to limit Google’s ability to pay companies like Apple for preferential placement in its products. It agrees that Google is invulnerable and intends to do something about it.

There’s plenty of potential upside in all this unpredictability, depending on where one sits in the industry. But the risks are weird and widely distributed. OpenAI’s spurned co-founder happens to be Elon Musk, who is currently the richest man in the world, controls a new government quasi-agency, and has direct and seemingly constant access to the incoming president and a new AI company of his own. A commerce crackdown would seem like great news for Amazon — Temu, Shein, and TikTok Shop have been marked as clear threats by the company — except for the fact that Amazon recently launched a knock-off Temu of its own, also sources a large share of its products from China, and operates similarly and in some cases almost identically to companies that are more explicitly about cross-border buying and selling. And while a cowed Google and banned TikTok would seem to benefit Meta, there’s a catch there, too: Though Mark Zuckerberg has recently been attempting to repair his relationship with Trump, Trump has, over the years and on a number of different occasions, suggested that Zuckerberg should probably be in jail, and recently cited the possibility that a TikTok ban might benefit him as a reason it shouldn’t happen.

For the first time since the onset of the pandemic, in other words, there’s a profound sense of uncertainty in the tech industry. Next year will be a strange one for big tech, and for Apple’s little chart.