Temu remains the most downloaded free app in America

Apple has released its 2024 app download charts, revealing the most downloaded apps and games across America this year. Chinese shopping app Temu has retained the top spot for the second year running after dethroning TikTok in 2023.

The e-commerce app is centered around hyper-reduced pricing, with many items costing less than $10. It has spawned competition from Amazon, which launched Amazon Haul, a storefront with products for $20 or less. Competitor Shein, another online shopping platform centered around cheap pricing, was placed 12th on the list, while Amazon Shopping scraped in at spot number 20.

The second place spot this year has been taken by Meta’s X competitor Threads, which reached 275 million monthly active users last month. It was rated number three in the download chart last year. BlueSky, which saw a huge surge in new users (it added over a million new users in a single week after X changed its terms of service to allow data shared by users to be used to train its AI, Grok), did not make the top 20 Apple app store list.

TikTok took third place in the chart, despite facing a ban in the US. The video-sharing social media platform is currently appealing a US Senate ruling that decided it would be banned in America unless there was a change of ownership away from China.

There are currently several investors poised to buy TikTok should the courts enforce the ban despite ByteDance’s appeal, including venture capitalist Kevin O’Leary, former US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, and former CEO of Activision Bobby Kotick.

Coming in at fourth place is OpenAI’s ChatGPT app. While there are other generative AI chatbots out there, ChatGPT is the one that has caught the public’s eye. This year was an important year for the relationship between OpenAI and Apple – Apple Intelligence launched as a huge collaboration between the two tech giants, bringing the genAI capabilities of OpenAI to Apple’s huge user base.

This generated outrage from Elon Musk, who has a long-running feud with OpenAI. After the announcement that Apple devices would come with OpenAI features integrated, Musk threatened to ban them entirely from the premises of businesses he owns.

Rounding out the top five is the Google app, but this isn’t the only Google item in the top 20. Despite Apple having its own map and email tools, people are loyal to the Big G. Also making the top 20 are YouTube, Gmail, and Google Maps. This year Google brought a key maps feature to Apple when it added speed limit warnings to the app.

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