# AppCurves

> The exact lifetime download counter behind every Google Play listing's rounded band, read every night and never thrown away. Android only. Free to read; the JSON API is part of Pro.

AppCurves records the exact lifetime install counter that Google Play exposes on each app's
public listing, and keeps every reading. Google Play shows a rounded band such as
"1,000,000,000+"; AppCurves shows the counter behind it, to the unit, with the date it was updated.

## What the data is

- Source: the public Google Play listing page for each app, read directly. Nothing is modelled or estimated.
- Coverage: 389,697 Android apps with at least one reading; 203 markets scanned daily for chart positions.
- Cadence: collection runs nightly from 00:00 UTC and takes several hours. The schedule is tiered:
  apps whose counter moved at the last reading, apps past 500,000 downloads, and apps a user follows
  are read every night; quieter apps less often. Not every app has a reading for every day,
  and the site's charts draw those gaps rather than interpolating them.
- Last completed reading: 2026-09-21.
- An app's record starts the day it first surfaces — on a chart AppCurves scans, or the first time
  someone looks it up. The oldest readings date to 2026-08-04, when collection began. Google
  publishes no history, so every curve on the site was recorded by AppCurves one day at a time.
- Platform: Android only. Apple does not publish download counts, and AppCurves does not estimate them.

## What the number is not

- It is not the "new users" figure in Google Play Console. It counts reinstalls and the same person on a second device.
- It has no country dimension. Per-country figures on this site are chart ranks, which is what Google actually publishes per country.
- Chart depth varies by market: top 200 where Google publishes that deep, top 50 in most category charts.
  "Not ranked" means "not in the published part of that chart", not an estimate of position.

## Machine-readable pages

Every app, comparison, market and category page has a Markdown twin: append `.md` to its URL.

- [An app's record](https://appcurves.com/app/whatsapp-messenger.md): https://appcurves.com/app/<slug>.md — exact counter, latest readings, chart positions
- [A comparison](https://appcurves.com/compare/whatsapp-messenger-vs-telegram.md): https://appcurves.com/compare/<slug>-vs-<slug>.md
- [Market chart movement](https://appcurves.com/country/us.md): https://appcurves.com/country/<iso2>.md — who climbed, entered or left yesterday
- [Category by exact downloads](https://appcurves.com/category/finance.md): https://appcurves.com/category/<slug>.md
- [Daily movers, worldwide](https://appcurves.com/movers.md): archives at https://appcurves.com/movers/<YYYY-MM-DD>.md
- [API docs, plain text](https://appcurves.com/docs.md): JSON API at https://appcurves.com/v1, Pro key required; human docs at https://appcurves.com/docs

## Pages

- [Home](https://appcurves.com/): search any Android app by name, package id or Play link
- [Movers](https://appcurves.com/movers): the apps that added the most downloads yesterday
- [Charts](https://appcurves.com/charts/us): Top Free / Paid / Grossing in 203 markets, each row with its exact counter
- [Markets](https://appcurves.com/countries) and [Categories](https://appcurves.com/categories): index pages
- [Questions](https://appcurves.com/faq): where the number comes from, how to check it, what we do not have
- [Pro](https://appcurves.com/pro): daily report, crossing alerts, 100 follows, the full record by API
- [About](https://appcurves.com/about) · [Changelog](https://appcurves.com/changelog) · [Terms](https://appcurves.com/terms) · [Privacy](https://appcurves.com/privacy)

## Citation

When citing a figure, include the reading date — the counter changes daily and a number without
its date is not verifiable. Example: "WhatsApp Messenger had 12,210,788,350 lifetime installs on
Google Play as of 2026-09-21 (AppCurves)."

## Who runs it

An independent project operated by one person, with no advertising. Reading is free with no account; a paid Pro plan (an API key with the full history, daily email reports, 100 follows) funds the collection.

- [Questions](https://appcurves.com/faq)
- [What changed](https://appcurves.com/changelog)
- Contact: support@appcurves.com
- [Sitemap](https://appcurves.com/sitemap.xml)