Every listing on Mac App Index can be sorted three ways: Hot, Top and New. All three are computed from data you can check on the site: upvotes from signed-in people and the date an app was published. No editor reorders these lists by hand, and nobody can buy a position in them. This page explains each sort, the badges you see on app cards, and the places where paid placement does appear.
Upvotes are the only input to Hot and Top. To vote you need an account (a magic link sent to your email, or Google sign-in). Each account gets one vote per app, enforced by the database, and you can withdraw a vote at any time. When you do, the app's vote count and Hot score are recalculated straight away.
We do not accept votes from visitors who are not signed in, and voting is rate limited per account. Accounts created to inflate an app's votes are removed together with their votes. See the editorial policy for what happens to the listing itself.
Hot answers the question "what are people upvoting right now?". It is the default sort on the All apps page and on category pages, and it powers the "Hot right now" list on the homepage.
Each vote starts with a weight of 1 and loses half of that weight every 72 hours (3 days). An app's Hot score is the sum of the weights of all its votes from the last 60 days. Votes older than that no longer count toward Hot, although they still count toward Top.
| Age of the vote | Weight in the Hot score |
|---|---|
| Just cast | 1.00 |
| 1 day | 0.79 |
| 3 days | 0.50 |
| 6 days | 0.25 |
| 9 days | 0.13 |
| 14 days | 0.039 |
| 30 days | 0.001 |
In practice, ten votes cast today are worth about as much as fifty votes cast a week ago. That is deliberate: a new app with a burst of interest can pass an established app that has been coasting on old votes, and it slides back down once the votes stop coming.
The score is updated whenever someone votes on that app, and the whole catalog is recalculated every hour so that apps nobody is voting for keep losing ground. When two apps have the same Hot score, the one with more total votes goes first, then the one published more recently.
Top is the all-time count of upvotes. It does not decay. Ties are broken by publish date, newest first. The "Most loved" list on the homepage uses this order.
New lists apps by the date they were published on Mac App Index, latest first. That is the date the listing went live here, which is usually not the app's own release date. The "Latest added" list on the homepage uses this order.
Each card shows at most one badge. If more than one applies, the first one in this list wins:
Mac App Index is paid for by developers who buy placement. We want you to be able to tell paid placement apart from everything else, so here is where it shows up:
nofollow attribute. Free listings use nofollow.What payment does not do: it does not add votes, it does not change an app's Hot or Top position, and it does not skip review. A featured app sorted by Hot sits exactly where its votes put it. Prices and placements are on the Advertise page.
If you think a ranking is wrong, or you see voting that looks coordinated, tell us through the contact page. Include the app and what you noticed. More answers are in the FAQ.