Games

Mobile games are the one category where the product and the business model are hardest to separate. Almost everything at the top of the charts is free to download and funded afterwards — by ads between levels, by timers that stop you playing, by currency that removes friction the game added on purpose. None of that makes a game bad, but it does mean the download price tells you almost nothing about what it will cost you. So we rank on what can actually be checked: the App Store rating, how many people left it, when the game last shipped an update, and who publishes it. Where a game is worth paying for once instead, we say so plainly — a few dollars for a finite, complete, uninterrupted game is still the best value in mobile software.