Most Downloaded iPhone Apps - Facebook First

In the beginning, there was transparency. Apple shared with the world some data on most downloaded iPhone applications, as can be seen on this almost two-year old post of Michael Arrington on TechCrunch

Then it disappeared for some reason. Apple just published a list of top applications with no numbers in 2008, and nothing in 2009. With this new policy, developers just have access to their own data from Apple on a private basis. Some numbers also appear in the news occasionally.

Fortunately, some data are still public, such as the number of ratings, number of reviews, average rating, price and date of publication of each application. I have been working on gathering those public information and build an econometric model to estimate the number of downloads of each application based on this public data.

This needs to be an interactive and collaborative work so if any developer finds this interesting it would really help if they can share their precise data with me (in particular, the number of downloads of their own apps) so that the model becomes more robust over time. I will try to update this ranking on a regular basis if there is an interest.

All comments and messages are welcome. Please understand the first lists will probably include some approximations and miss some apps but it should quickly improve.

Here is a first sample with a rough estimate of the 20 most downloaded Free iPhone apps:

1 - Facebook / More than 30 million downloads
2 - Myspace Mobile / 25m
3 - Google Earth / 22m
4 - AIM / 21m
5 - Touch Hockey / 19m
6 - FlashLight / 19m
7 - UNO Free / 18m
8 - BubbleWrap / 18m
9 - textPlus / 17m
10 - Paper Toss / 17m
11 - Google Mobile / 17m
12 - Movies / 16m
13 - Pac Man Lite / 16m
14 - Shazam / 15m
15 - Labyrinth Lite Edition / 15m
16 - Lightsaber Unleashed / 15m
17 - Pandora Radio / 15m
18 - Words with Friends Free / 15m
19 - Tap Defense / 14m
20 - The Weather Channel / 14m