Apple's WWDC Rap Was More Than a Playlist
WWDC 2026's keynote ended with a surprise: a rap track called "Appreciation" by Erick the Architect that name-dropped and showed nearly 100 apps in less than two minutes.
That immediately got me wondering: were these apps chosen simply because they fit the song, or was Apple making a statement about the App Store?
Using Appfigures Intelligence, I looked at the numbers behind every app mentioned or shown in the track. What I found suggests the list was anything but random.
A Tiny App Group with Outsized Impact
The song referenced or showed 95 App Store apps. We excluded RoboCop: Rogue City, which is only available on Mac.
Compared to the roughly 2M active apps on the App Store, that's just 0.005% of the catalog. Yet over the last 12 months, those 95 apps generated an estimated 587M downloads and $3.7B in net revenue.
On average, an app mentioned or shown in the song was 270x the typical App Store app by downloads and 665x by revenue.
The list includes giants like TikTok, LinkedIn, and Peacock, along with visually featured apps like Simply Piano, but it isn't exclusively a collection of mega-hits. The median app in the group generated about $68K in net revenue over the last year, suggesting Apple also highlighted products that are leaders within their niches rather than simply the biggest businesses on the store.
Looking at downloads, Uber led the group with 55M downloads over the last year, followed closely by TikTok with 54M and Zoom with 38M. Revenue was dominated by TikTok ($1.5B net), Peacock ($578M), and LinkedIn ($551M).
Built to Last
Another shared trait that stood out to me is how established these apps are. The vast majority, 80%, launched between 2008 and 2019, giving the group an average age of about 11 years.
These aren't newcomers riding a trend. They're apps that have survived multiple generations of iPhone hardware, App Store changes, and shifting user habits.
Their chart history tells a similar tale. Of the 95 apps, 92 have reached #1 on at least one free or paid App Store chart somewhere in the world. And 61 have also hit #1 on a top-grossing chart.
In other words, most of these apps have already proven they can reach the top and stay there.
Recognition Beyond the Norm
Performance isn't the only thing these apps have in common. Several have also been recognized directly by Apple. At least five apps in the song have won Apple Design Awards, including Be My Eyes, League of Legends: Wild Rift, djay, NBA, and Tide Guide.
Taken together, the list is less like a random collection of app names picked for lyrical fit and more like a curated batch of the App Store's success stories.
Apple may have wrapped the message in a rap track, but the data suggests the company was highlighting a group of apps that have excelled across multiple dimensions: growth, longevity, cultural impact, and quality.
For developers, it's also a useful reminder that success on the App Store comes in many forms. Some of these apps generate billions, others dominate a niche, but nearly all have spent years building apps users keep coming back to. And get referenced in rap tracks, apparently.
All Apps Mentioned or Shown
Here are the 95 iOS apps mentioned or shown in the song, sorted alphabetically by app name.
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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.
