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Rising Star badge is one of the 28 app marketplace metrics and concepts defined in the AppRanks glossary. This page gives you a clear, plain-language explanation of what Rising Star badge means, why it matters when you evaluate an app, how AppRanks calculates and verifies it, and exactly where you will see it across our public app, audit, and comparison pages. Read on for the full definition, practical use cases, and links to related terms so you can interpret Rising Star badge with confidence.
Also known as: fastest-growing app, trending app, emerging app badge, growth badge, up-and-coming app
The Rising Star badge is Atlassian Marketplace's velocity-of-growth designation, awarded to apps showing the strongest relative install acceleration regardless of absolute volume. Unlike Bestseller (which favors mature, high-volume apps) or Spotlight (which is editorially curated), Rising Star surfaces apps in the steep portion of their growth curve — typically 6-18 months post-launch with strong week-over-week acceleration on installs and reviews. The badge rotates faster than Bestseller because growth percentages compress as install volume scales: an app that earns Rising Star at 500 installs per week will usually graduate out of the rotation within 2-3 quarters as its growth normalizes against a larger base. AppRanks tracks Rising Star assignments via Atlassian's `?marketingLabel=rising-star` endpoint and records gain/loss events with crawl-date attribution. The Shopify-side analogue is the New & Noteworthy rail and the WooCommerce Top New Extensions collection; both reward early-momentum apps with a similar visibility-vs-velocity tradeoff. Cross-platform, AppRanks unifies these into a single "emerging" event type so investor watchlists can span marketplaces.
Rising Star is the best leading indicator of which apps will convert to Bestseller in the next 6-12 months. For investors and partnership scouts, the Rising Star list is a validated shortlist of category challengers; for developers, watching Rising Star rotations surfaces emerging competitive threats before they show up in the Bestseller leaderboard. Earning Rising Star yourself is also the most explicit feedback signal that a recent product investment (pricing change, feature launch, integration) is moving real demand — Atlassian's algorithm only rewards sustained acceleration, not single-week spikes.
AppRanks polls Atlassian's `?marketingLabel=rising-star` daily and timestamps state transitions against the crawl date. The underlying growth-rate threshold is undocumented; AppRanks mirrors marketplace assignment without re-computing.