What this is. There's a half-serious joke that Canada is just a few corporations in a trenchcoat, poking necessary fun at the concentration in key sectors of our economy. That concentration shows up in the Canadian apps we use most, which are overwhelmingly from our coziest industries: banks, telecoms, airlines, and grocers. Only a few of our top apps come from Canadian tech companies. And most of our leading apps aren't Canadian at all — they're made by American tech giants.
None of that is destiny. To track our progress, this index counts how many of the top 100 apps in Canada are Canadian, and how many of those are built by Canadian tech. It also tracks the US charts, because it matters even more when people outside Canada adopt our homegrown apps, and more still when those apps come from Canadian tech companies.
How the board is built. Each app is scored on its average position on Canada's free-app chart across the window, and the hundred best scores make the board. An app has to hold a highly ranked position all year to appear here, which signals durable app adoption rather than a brief spike. ; on a day an app isn't on the tracked chart, that day is scored one below the deepest position tracked that day. Where an app's owner isn't obvious from its name, the owner is shown beneath it.