Mac app rankings

"Best" is always somebody's taste. These lists answer plainer questions: what do Mac people actually install, which open source apps do developers love, what is rising this month, and which apps will be left behind when Rosetta goes. Every list says where its numbers come from and when they were read.

Looking for hand-picked apps instead? The best of pages are built from apps listed and checked on MacPip.

• The most popular Mac apps, by real installsNot a list of favorites. These are the 50 Mac apps people actually installed the most in the last 30 days, counted from Homebrew.Top 3: LibreOffice, Docker Desktop and Microsoft Visual Studio Code
• The most starred open source Mac apps su GitHubStars are GitHub's way of saying "I like this". Here are the open source Mac apps with the most of them, picked one by one so only real Mac apps made it in.Top 3: Ghostty, IINA and Stats
• Popular Mac apps that still need RosettaRosetta 2 lets Intel apps run on Apple silicon Macs, and Apple has said macOS 27 is the last version with full Rosetta. These are the popular apps that still lean on it.Top 3: Android File Transfer, Minecraft and Blizzard Battle.net
• The most popular Homebrew casksEvery cask, not just apps: the 50 most installed Homebrew casks of the last 365 days, with the line to install each one.Top 3: Codex, Claude Code and Google Cloud CLI
• Trending Mac apps this monthWhich Mac apps are suddenly everywhere? We compare each app's installs in the last 30 days with its average month over the past year.Top 3: DeepSeek Harness, Grok Bot and Homebrew
• The most popular AI apps for MacChat apps, coding tools, local models and dictation: the AI apps Mac people installed most in the last 30 days.Top 3: Claude, ChatGPT and OpenCode
• The fastest growing open source Mac appsThe open source Mac apps gaining GitHub stars the fastest, so you can find the next Rectangle or IINA early.Top 3: Compositor, Vorssaint and cmux
• Popular Mac apps that only run on Apple siliconSome Mac apps skip Intel Macs entirely and need an M1 or later. These are the ones people install the most.Top 3: Vorssaint, Raycast and LM Studio
• Open source Mac apps written in SwiftWant to see how a real Mac app is put together? These shipping open source Mac apps are written in Swift, many with SwiftUI.Top 3: IINA, Stats and UTM
• The most installed open source Mac appsStars show who likes an app. Installs show who uses it. This list ranks open source Mac apps by installs, with stars next to them.Top 3: Ghostty, iTerm2 and Stats

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