App Store 2026 in numbers: AI, pricing, abandoned apps

q2dg

Very interesting, thanks! Could bé another similar report about Google's App Store? Thanks again!

jonathanstrange

I'd rather be interested in what apps actually make money and how much but I suspect there is no public data for that.

owais_1897

there are many apps but only few of them are worth it

carlos-cute

Thanks ! I would be interested if it exists figures for MAC App Store only...

aurareturn

I think the app store will be in trouble in the future. I think most non-gaming apps will be replaced by a single AI app that is like a super assistant to you. No need to book on Booking.com app if you can just have your assistant look for what you actually want. Likewise, I think Google Search is in similar amount of trouble, if not more and faster. Why do you need to search on your own if AI can search 20-30 websites in seconds and find what you're looking for? Same for things like Microsoft's cash cow Office suites. In fact, Claude already has docs built in. This is why I think big tech went all in on AI. All their cash cows are under huge threat by AI-first products.

Smalltalker-80

Its probably just me, but I had to scroll all the way to the bottom, mentioning something about Macs, to verify that this was only about the Apple app store.

heliographe

I’m an indie developer in one of the categories mentioned as being AI heavy (Photo & Video). I’ve been shipping apps since way before vibe coding ( https://heliographe.studio ), and it’s been a pretty speedy transition in terms of how the market has shifted in the last 12 months. Making a high quality camera/photo app used to require a lot of fairly advanced skills: UI design & engineering for the core app, an understanding of signal processing/color transforms/etc for producing the final image, graphics programming to keep everything rendering smooth in the preview (especially if you have advanced features like focus peaking, scopes/histograms, etc)… It used to be that if you shipped a polished camera app, you would get at least a bit of attention just on those merits. But in the last year it has become utterly trivial for anyone to make a camera app, and every week there are dozens of new entrants on the market (most of them claim to do their own unique non-AI, film-like processing). But of those, which has gotten the most attention? I’d argue it’s the just released Chromagraph, designed in part by Rian Johnson of Star Wars fame. https://www.theverge.com/tech/1025659/rian-johnson-chromagra... If you compare it to every other camera app released recently, I’d argue it’s pretty average in terms of features/output quality. But that name recognition is what drives downloads more than ever.

pardeeplogisch

Which finding is more surprising: that nearly 10% of charting apps mention AI, or that around 20% haven't been updated for at least a year? What does this tell us about the long-term sustainability of apps?

ddxv

The 'abandoned' apps are also often actively advertising, so possibly they do something that causes it. I see tens of thousands of apps churn like that a month. They're not some quite app that a developer stopped updating, but something actively having ads bought for it that is then taken off market. For example these apps advertising in October 2026 https://appgoblin.info/reports/ad-user-acquisition-2026-octo... And some of them, like the block game are already gone: https://appgoblin.info/apps/com.game.best.mini.pro.dragon.ra... This link is currently not active: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.game.best....

Bengalilol

11.5% of "free shopping apps sell in-app purchases or subscriptions", that spunned my curiosity. What could be those apps: - resale/second hand apps that offer boosts to be seen? - apps that sell alert systems when a price is dropping? - grocery/listing apps that sell "no ads" functionalities? - gated brands with VIP things? Yet, 11.5% looks enormous. I may be old.

bemtevi

I wish there was a filter in the app store to filter and only show apps that having nothing to do with AI. It's become increasingly hard to find a decent, non-AI app these days.