Thinking in Public
Just looked at the App Store leaderboard. It used to be all social media apps. Now it's all AI apps — and, weirdly, two Microsoft apps: Teams and Outlook.
My guess on those two: Microsoft just signed a big corporate deal — the government of Spain or something — and thousands of people got told to install both on their phones the same week. That's the fun of the chart: it leaks news.
Same chart, new census — the leaderboard is attention, ranked
The leaderboard is the closest thing we have to a census of attention. It answers one question with no spin: when someone gets a new phone or a new urge, what do they install first?
For a decade the answer was a social app. The answer changed. People aren't downloading a new place to scroll — they're downloading something that does work for them. That's not a feature shift, that's an era shift, the same way the chart flipping from games to social was.
And the corporate apps sneaking into the top ten tell their own story: AI adoption isn't just consumers anymore. When a government or a bank moves, a hundred thousand installs land in a week and the chart moves with it.