Open the App Store on a slow morning in June 2026, scroll into the Entertainment category, and you will find, sitting at number eight, an app that makes fart sounds. It is called iFart. It is older than the iPhone in your hand, older than the App Store category it is currently outranking, older than most of the companies whose apps surround it. As of late June, it sat eighth in Entertainment and inside the top 150 overall, in a store that now holds more than two million apps. Almost everything that charted beside it in those first months is gone. iFart is still here and still selling.
The persistence is the interesting part. An eighteen-year-old novelty has outlived every reason anyone had to buy it, and that gap, between the apps we are sold and the ones we keep, is worth a closer look.
The Land Grab
To understand why iFart is remarkable, you have to remember how empty the world was when it arrived.
When Apple opened the App Store in July 2008, it launched with roughly 500 apps. Nobody knew what the thing was for. There was no playbook, no marketing industry built around it, and no real way to know what people would pay for. There was a brand-new marketplace, a few hundred experiments, and a wide-open field where one person with an idea could ship software to millions of strangers overnight. For a brief window, it was a real land grab.
Joel Comm, a Colorado internet entrepreneur who had already written a New York Times bestseller about Google advertising, looked at that field and decided the silliest idea in the room was the right one. In December 2008, he and a small team released an app that did exactly one thing: it played fart sounds, with names like Dirty Raoul and Brown Mosquito, and a prank feature that let you set one off on a delay.
It hit number one in the entire paid App Store on Christmas Day and earned roughly $27,000 in a single day. Comm also did something almost no developer was doing at the time, which mattered more than the farts: he published his sales figures, day by day, on his blog, while the climb was happening.
“Journalists need numbers,” Comm has said of that decision. In a marketplace where everyone was guessing what a download was worth, iFart was the one app showing its receipts. The novelty pulled readers in; the numbers gave reporters something to write about. Wired, the Washington Post, Ars Technica, and Fortune all did the math in real time. A decade before “building in public” became a startup catchphrase, a fart app was already doing it.
The Marker of a Moment
By early 2009, iFart was more than a hit. It had become shorthand for the moment itself.
That January, the New York Times Magazine ran a column titled “Dumb and Dumber 2.0,” and the product it reached for to explain the whole giddy, lawless moment was iFart. Of everything the new store had produced, a 99-cent gag was what the paper of record chose to hold up as the marker of the era. Years later, when the Times revisited tech’s origin stories, the app turned up again, named alongside far more respectable software.
It stood for an innocence the App Store has spent the years since trying to engineer out of itself. There were no in-app purchases yet, no subscriptions, no ad slots in search results, no growth teams. There was an idea, a price, and a button. The whole proposition was joy, sold for less than a dollar, with no second act required.
The imitators understood the joy. They did not understand the rest. More than 1,200 copycat fart apps eventually flooded the store, and not one of them dislodged the original. iFart had arrived first, told its own story, and turned a federal trademark fight over the phrase “pull my finger” into a media event instead of a headache. The copies were competing on sound effects. iFart had stopped being one.
The Refusal to Die
Then comes the part that is hard to explain.
iFart has come roaring back up the charts at least eight separate times over eighteen years, almost always with no marketing behind it. The pattern holds with odd reliability: every few years, some unrelated event reaches down and pulls the app back into the conversation.
In late 2011, George Clooney landed the cover of Rolling Stone and, somewhere in the profile, volunteered the line that became the app’s permanent epitaph: farts are funny, and he keeps iFart on his phone. Sales jumped fivefold in a day. Around the same time, Helena Bonham Carter told a British paper that she and Colin Firth had spent the filming of The King’s Speech pranking each other with it, and that Firth’s phone had gone off in the car on the way to the Oscars, the night he won Best Actor. Nobody paid for any of it, and nobody planned it.
In 2016, a segment on a BBC variety show sent the app to number one in Entertainment in the United Kingdom, a surge nobody on the iFart side engineered or even understood at first. In March 2020, in the disoriented first days of pandemic lockdown, the actress Dana Delany tweeted that she was sitting alone, laughing until she cried, playing with iFart. That one tweet drove the app back to number one in Entertainment and number 13 overall in paid apps, twelve years after launch.
In the spring of 2026 came the most modern resurrection yet. The app surfaced as a test case in a viral argument over whether AI chatbots simply tell users what they want to hear, and the tech press, from PC Gamer to Gizmodo, wrote about the fart app all over again. After eighteen years, it had become a yardstick for measuring artificial intelligence.
No campaign produces a curve like that. The app just keeps resurfacing, on its own, whenever the culture needs a punchline everyone already understands.
What the Persistence Means
All of this is easy to file under “the internet is weird” and forget. But the longevity is making a real argument.
The App Store has spent eighteen years getting more sophisticated, more monetized, and more anxious. The apps surrounding iFart on the charts are engineered to capture attention, harvest data, and turn free users into recurring revenue. They are built to be needed. iFart was built to be enjoyed once for a dollar, and then again whenever you happened to remember it. It asks nothing of you. No subscription, no feed, no streak to keep alive, no notification begging you to come back.
That may be the point. In a store engineered to manufacture obligation, the app that asks for none is the one nobody bothers to delete. Its YouTube channel alone has logged more than 21 million views and still draws traffic every day, not because anyone promotes it, but because farts were funny in 2008 and they are funny now, and something that small and that honest does not really go out of style.
The App Store turns twenty in 2027, and the retrospectives are coming. They will be full of the apps that defined the era and then came to define our worries about it: the social networks, the games, the platforms that changed how a generation spends its time. Somewhere in those accounts, almost as a footnote, the fart app will appear. It has earned more than that. Of everything that rushed into that wide-open field in 2008, the digital whoopee cushion is the one that never left. It is still charting and still making people laugh who did not plan to.
It outlasted nearly all of them by doing the one thing none of them dared to try: it stayed a joke, and the joke never stopped working.
Photo by Mariia Shalabaieva: Unsplash
