The World Cup Took Over the App Store's Top Five

A prediction market, a government savings app, and three streaming apps are fighting over the same real estate, and the World Cup is the reason.

Apple's live US top-free chart this morning has Kalshi's "Trade the World Cup" trading the #1 spot with FOX One and the Trump Accounts app, while Peacock holds down the top five. That is not four separate stories. It is one story: the 48-team FIFA World Cup, running June 11 to July 19, has become the single biggest force on American phone screens, and money apps are riding it as hard as streaming apps are.

A betting app is the most downloaded thing in America

Kalshi did more than $31 billion in trading volume in June, a 70%+ jump from May's $17.9 billion, and has held over $1 billion in daily volume every day since the tournament kicked off June 11. Polymarket's international exchange hit a record $10.8 billion for the month too.

• Kalshi and Polymarket combined for 73.5% of new installs among major sportsbook and prediction market apps in the first half of June, according to Apptopia data reported by DeFi Rate: Kalshi at 42.3%, Polymarket at 31.2%, with DraftKings (13.7%) and FanDuel (8.9%) trailing.
• The mechanism is blunt: Kalshi renamed its app "Trade the World Cup," signed a sponsorship deal with the Argentine Football Association, and is running a social campaign fronted by Lionel Messi.
• The Round of 16 (July 4-7, wrapping up today) is driving the current spike. On Monday, more than $64 million traded on Kalshi and $122 million on Polymarket just on whether the US beats Belgium, at long odds of 3-4%. Robinhood/Susquehanna's month-old joint venture Rothera has also grabbed 7% of US prediction market volume by riding Robinhood's brokerage traffic straight into World Cup contracts.
• Quarterfinals run July 9-11, semifinals July 14-15, the final is July 19. Expect these apps to keep rotating through the top five until then, and to fall hard afterward.

The other #1: a Treasury Department app

Sitting right alongside Kalshi at the top of the chart is Trump Accounts: Official App, the free portal the US Treasury built (with Robinhood handling brokerage and clearing) for the new child investment accounts created by the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act."

• The app climbed 182 spots, from #183 to #1 overall, on June 30, with daily downloads peaking above 337,000 and more than 522,000 downloads in its final pre-launch week.
• The trigger was a hard deadline: accounts started receiving contributions, including the Treasury's own $1,000-per-child pilot deposit, on July 4.
• As of last night, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said on X that 6 million children had signed up before launch and that the app is still sitting near the top of the charts, per reporting picked up this morning.
• It's a rare case of a government service, not a company, running the download playbook: coordinated press releases, a hard countdown, and a designated single point of entry. The app makes no direct revenue since it's free and government-run, but its ranking is effectively a real-time gauge of a federal program's uptake.

Broadcast rights are the other growth hack this month

FOX One and Telemundo owe their chart positions to the same lever: exclusive World Cup broadcast rights.

• FOX Sports holds English-language US rights through the final; its FOX One app is streaming all 104 matches, with knockout coverage running June 28 through July 19, and has been trading places with Kalshi at #1-2 on the free chart all week.
• Telemundo, which holds Spanish-language rights, climbed 96 spots in four days back when the tournament opened June 11, jumping from around #101 to #5 in Entertainment as weekly downloads went from 33,000 to more than 145,000. That was a month ago, but the app is still benefiting from being the only official Spanish-language stream.
• Peacock's own surge was also an early-June event (a 65-spot jump to #4 overall between May 30 and June 4, per MWM, driven by a horror movie debut, an MLB game, and the Love Island USA premiere) rather than new news. But it's still parked in the top five today, and its next catalyst is close: Love Island USA's season 8 finale, with a $100,000 prize, airs July 12.
• The lesson for developers: a scheduling calendar (broadcast rights, a season finale, a funding deadline) is turning out to be a more reliable chart-topping mechanism this month than any single viral moment.

Meta quietly shipped a new gaming app, and almost nobody noticed

While the charts were consumed by the World Cup, Meta launched an app called Pocket on June 29 with zero announcement.

• Pocket lets people generate small interactive games and apps ("gizmos") from AI prompts, plus browse a scrollable feed of what others made. It's the product of Meta's earlier acquisition of the team behind Gizmo, a similar vibe-coding platform.
• Reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi spotted the Play Store listing on July 2 and posted it to X; that's how the story broke, not a Meta press release.
• The catch: Appfigures says Pocket is currently live only in Brazil, and it's so new the firm can't yet tell whether it has any real downloads.
• The backstory worth watching is Gizmo's own track record: 635,000 lifetime installs across iOS and Android with 98% positive sentiment before Meta absorbed the team. If Pocket expands beyond Brazil with that kind of reception, it's a sleeper to watch in the AI-gaming category.

OpenClaw, the AI agent that spawned a fake social network, is now on your phone

OpenClaw shipped native iOS and Android apps on June 30, letting people run their AI agent gateway from a phone instead of the command line.

• OpenClaw is the free, open source agent that went viral earlier this year around MoltBook, a social network supposedly populated entirely by AI agents that was later revealed to have real humans impersonating agents mixed in. Its creator, Peter Steinberger, joined OpenAI in February.
• The notable mechanical detail: the iOS build cleared Apple's App Store review, something agentic AI tools have historically struggled to do because of security concerns around apps that take autonomous action on a device.
• The reception is split hard by platform. The iOS app is listed under Productivity with a "Data Not Collected" privacy label and has landed relatively smoothly. The Android version is getting hammered, sitting at a 2.2-star rating with widespread complaints about pairing failures and bugs.
• Worth tracking whether Android reviews recover or whether the rocky launch becomes the lasting impression for a tool that built its reputation on being chaotic in an entertaining way.

The App Store's fee fight is back at the Supreme Court

Away from the charts, the policy story that actually moves developer income: Apple and Epic's commission dispute has escalated to the Supreme Court.

• The Ninth Circuit had found Apple in contempt for charging a 27% commission on external payment links, ruling that the fee defeated the purpose of the court's original order allowing those links. Apple appealed to the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear only the contempt question, not Epic's broader ask of applying the injunction to every developer, not just Epic.
• The procedural calendar: Apple's motion to stay the lower-court proceedings was due July 6, Epic responds July 10, Apple replies July 13, and then Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers decides whether everything pauses until the Supreme Court rules, likely next term starting in October.
• The stakes are concrete: the App Store generated an estimated $85 billion in developer billings in 2023, and a ruling on what counts as a "reasonable" external-link commission could reset that number materially in either direction.
• Separately, and more concretely, Apple has already cut its own commissions in Brazil under a settlement with regulator CADE: down to 21% standard (10% for small developers), plus a 15% (or 10%) fee on sales routed to an external website. Developers there had until July 6 to accept the new terms. It's a preview of what "reasonable" might look like if US courts eventually force something similar.

Also moving

• Goddess of Victory: Nikke reclaimed #1 on the Korean App Store (and #2 in Japan and Taiwan) after a July 2 summer update added swimsuit-themed characters and a new rhythm-game minigame. The nearly four-year-old game pulled the same trick in May with its anniversary update, suggesting SHIFT UP has found a repeatable seasonal-content growth loop rather than a one-off spike.
• Freecash, the rewards-for-surveys app that quietly camped in the US top 15 for weeks, is still there, a reminder that not every top-chart app needs a news hook to stay put.