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

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....

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?

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.

Very interesting, thanks!

Could bé another similar report about Google's App Store?

Thanks again!

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

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

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

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.

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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.