> Where do you get your stats? Honestly, I always see it written as りんご (never katakana, nor kanji), but I don't want to be a Japanese language Internet troll. (Yes, there are many: "Oh, but actually...")

All of the stats are calculated by me analyzing texts from my corpus. If you follow the link that I've pasted and click on "Used in" then you can see where exactly this form of the word is used.

リンゴ is used in: https://jpdb.io/vocabulary/1555480/リンゴ/used-in

林檎 is used in: https://jpdb.io/vocabulary/1555480/林檎/used-in

So you can see that the kanji form is used relatively often in novels (which makes sense, as those often use higher level/more flower-y language).

(I also use modern news articles in my corpus and that's also included in the stats, although this isn't shown on the "used in" pages.)

Honestly just saw 苹果 a couple days ago so even that spelling can't be called that rare. It really depends on what you're consuming, if you're just reading daily SoL content I doubt you'd ever see it but I do think 林檎 is pretty common.

I have not seen 苹果 before, where did you see it? It looks Chinese, and Japanese Wikipedia calls it "簡体字中国語表記". I don't think most native speakers can read it!

林檎 for sure is common.

According to jpdb possibly the only visual novel with the spelling and to be honest it was in an excerpt of a translation of a play, and it had furigana. :p https://jpdb.io/vocabulary/1555480/%E8%8B%B9%E6%9E%9C/used-i...

Outside of Chinese (where it is standard), I’ve not seen 苹果 before, but the Japanese input on iOS suggests it after a bit of scrolling. It’s in the dictionary on there as well, where the pronunciation is given as ひょうか or へいか, which is fairly logical.

林檎 is common enough that you will see it in supermarket signage (without furigana).