As an indie iOS dev, the abandoned apps number doesn't surprise me. Shipping is the easy part these days. But if you don’t earn anything from it, updating and maintenance would be pointless
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.
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.
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.
Recognition and marketing will become key in the future if you want whatever content to get attention, maybe trusted reviews. When it become so easy to pump out whatever app, music, video etc. we will be drowning in it - and you need an already established named or a trusted reviewer or crowd-wisdom (as in app rating) to pick what is actually good.
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.
Ah yes, I remember those times.
"bird anger"
"super pdf toolbox"
"mega vpn gold"
"speedy and very angry"
"six nights at Frankie's"
"minercfrafts"
. . .
I bet it's pretty close to a Pareto distribution with 20% of the apps making 80% of the total App store revenue. You can guess which apps those are from Apple's top/editor's choice charts.
Do you even need the top chart when you open the app and every other day it's either a Scopely property or Monopoly Go?
It's wild to know that Freecash is somehow back in the App Store after [1] earlier this year and they're actively running aggressive marketing campaigns on TV again.
Not public, but services like sensor tower make a decent guess based on (I assume) a small set of people who are willing to install what's effectively spyware for $$$.
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.
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.
Am I one of very few people that believes LLM apps don't solve or replace a large number of apps.
Take all these basic lifestyle CRUD apps. Maybe it's a skill issue on my part, but whenever I've tried to use LLM apps over any sort of medium-to-long-term time scale for tracking something (ie. endurance running training), within about a month it begins hallucinating, recalling the wrong things, linking the wrong bits of data to other bits of data (dates, distances, heart rate data, workout paces etc), and it does all of this even when pointed to a basic spreadsheet or simple text file to keep it onboard with what happened where. It just seems to look at these files, and then look at it's own context and confuse all the details based on its own context.
Every other month, some brand new shiny model is released and it's exactly the same deal every time. I think the underlying technology simply can't deal with these sorts of goals. A whole range of apps for lifestyle tracking don't seem under threat, in my opinion, if this is the best its capable of.
Many other things I can't imagine wanting an AI to do for me, especially anything involving payments, bookings. There was a discussion the other day on here about AI being used to order takeout. Why would somebody want to delegate one of their last personal decisions to a LLM?
What you're saying is true now, but given the existence of grok-bot and similar dots (et al.) there is now an amassing amount of training data for "personal assistants" -- so in a couple of generations time, you'll find frontier models will be extremely capable in these areas.
Harnesses have been developed for this, and its also fairly trivial to do large scale verifiable-rewards post-training for "personal assistant" style things. eg., invent a booking website, invent a PA GUI-aware harness, and reward the model when a successful booking takes place. Do that 1bn times.
I am in the pro food-order delivery department. I just want to tell my phone, "Hey Siri I want to order at Restaurant X, we are two people, no desert - make suggestion" and it shows me the order on the display with total price, arrival time and the selected food items. If I want, I can command changes - or simply say "Yes thats good, confirm the order" and be done. This is especially useful as I mostly order the same things across 2-3 restaurants, that is most of the time the suggestion is probably right.
A good alternative for your example is to make it create a stateful artefact (Claude) / whatever OpenAI calls ChatGPT.
And there, it has a database of sorts, running god knows where on god knows what, and you have a single-user web app that you may or may not ever open and see (since your favorite AI agent can just read and update it for you anyway).
Today it’s still something the user has to suggest / request.
Tomorrow? If they put a bit of effort these models will reach for building these one-off ephemeral or long-lived hyper-custom apps the same way they now reach for a python sandbox for basic arithmetics and statistics.
Looking for a flat? Scheduled task + CRM like artefact for it to monitor, maintain, and update.
Looking for holidays? Your own personal shareable moodboard with destinations and what not.
Have a use case or task for which chat or editing text docs is a frustrating way of correcting or giving feedback? Have it build a dedicated, custom artefact just for that.
When you encounter a use case where LLMs limits show, make them build tools.
Assistant booking a place for me is last thing I'd want, I want to see ratings, photos, overall look&feel of the place, not spin the wheel and get some random place booked
I don't think sites like booking are at risk, as an assistant will just as likely use them. But there may be some kind of SEO tricks that companies like that could use to make LLM agents prefer them.
That said, I don't know about most of you but booking a hotel / flight is the kind of thing I do maybe once a year - it's too incidental (for me) to even consider automating.
That said, Google (search) is in trouble, although they're ready for it because their own AI products are solid and they already have the infrastructure and whatnot to run them, unlike e.g. Anthropic or OpenAI for who their AI products are their whole business. Likewise, Q&A sites like Stack Overflow, Quora are at risk.
Even Wikipedia is seeing less visitors, but I'm not too worried about that because visitor count isn't what they need to (or should) optimize for - their main risk is articles getting poisoned by LLM generated edits.
I don't think we are anywhere near it yet but perhaps in the future the App Store is a single app that conjures up whatever you ask of it. It could be called "The Last One".
I think the single AI app will be thoroughly enshittified. You ask for a hotel and the assistant operator is normally getting 20% of your payment as a kickback, so it shows you the highest price it thinks you'll pay, but 40% if it's a certain chain so it only shows that chain. Everything will be like this.
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?
If I didn't release an update for a couple of months I would get people asking if the software is dead. It got to the point where I would do trivial releases just to make it look alive whether they were needed or not.
As an indie iOS dev, the abandoned apps number doesn't surprise me. Shipping is the easy part these days. But if you don’t earn anything from it, updating and maintenance would be pointless
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....
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.
Recognition and marketing will become key in the future if you want whatever content to get attention, maybe trusted reviews. When it become so easy to pump out whatever app, music, video etc. we will be drowning in it - and you need an already established named or a trusted reviewer or crowd-wisdom (as in app rating) to pick what is actually good.
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.
Ah yes, I remember those times. "bird anger" "super pdf toolbox" "mega vpn gold" "speedy and very angry" "six nights at Frankie's" "minercfrafts" . . .
It is not as if slop was AI invention...
Very interesting, thanks!
Could bé another similar report about Google's App Store?
Thanks again!
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.
I'd rather be interested in what apps actually make money and how much but I suspect there is no public data for that.
I bet it's pretty close to a Pareto distribution with 20% of the apps making 80% of the total App store revenue. You can guess which apps those are from Apple's top/editor's choice charts.
Do you even need the top chart when you open the app and every other day it's either a Scopely property or Monopoly Go?
It's wild to know that Freecash is somehow back in the App Store after [1] earlier this year and they're actively running aggressive marketing campaigns on TV again.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/14/how-the-rewards-app-freeca...
Not public, but services like sensor tower make a decent guess based on (I assume) a small set of people who are willing to install what's effectively spyware for $$$.
Thanks ! I would be interested if it exists figures for MAC App Store only...
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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.
Yes, if you don't come from the Appleverse, "App Store" feels generic. But as a disclaimer, the whole site is Apple only.
<https://obelisk.club>
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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.
Am I one of very few people that believes LLM apps don't solve or replace a large number of apps.
Take all these basic lifestyle CRUD apps. Maybe it's a skill issue on my part, but whenever I've tried to use LLM apps over any sort of medium-to-long-term time scale for tracking something (ie. endurance running training), within about a month it begins hallucinating, recalling the wrong things, linking the wrong bits of data to other bits of data (dates, distances, heart rate data, workout paces etc), and it does all of this even when pointed to a basic spreadsheet or simple text file to keep it onboard with what happened where. It just seems to look at these files, and then look at it's own context and confuse all the details based on its own context.
Every other month, some brand new shiny model is released and it's exactly the same deal every time. I think the underlying technology simply can't deal with these sorts of goals. A whole range of apps for lifestyle tracking don't seem under threat, in my opinion, if this is the best its capable of.
Many other things I can't imagine wanting an AI to do for me, especially anything involving payments, bookings. There was a discussion the other day on here about AI being used to order takeout. Why would somebody want to delegate one of their last personal decisions to a LLM?
What you're saying is true now, but given the existence of grok-bot and similar dots (et al.) there is now an amassing amount of training data for "personal assistants" -- so in a couple of generations time, you'll find frontier models will be extremely capable in these areas.
Harnesses have been developed for this, and its also fairly trivial to do large scale verifiable-rewards post-training for "personal assistant" style things. eg., invent a booking website, invent a PA GUI-aware harness, and reward the model when a successful booking takes place. Do that 1bn times.
I am in the pro food-order delivery department. I just want to tell my phone, "Hey Siri I want to order at Restaurant X, we are two people, no desert - make suggestion" and it shows me the order on the display with total price, arrival time and the selected food items. If I want, I can command changes - or simply say "Yes thats good, confirm the order" and be done. This is especially useful as I mostly order the same things across 2-3 restaurants, that is most of the time the suggestion is probably right.
I don't doubt your experience with a basic lifestyle CRUD app today.
However, about 1 year ago, AI coding agents were laughed. Now the vast majority of code is written by them.
Intelligence getting exponentially cheaper per token. At some point, there will be an inflection point where "it just works".
A good alternative for your example is to make it create a stateful artefact (Claude) / whatever OpenAI calls ChatGPT.
And there, it has a database of sorts, running god knows where on god knows what, and you have a single-user web app that you may or may not ever open and see (since your favorite AI agent can just read and update it for you anyway).
Today it’s still something the user has to suggest / request.
Tomorrow? If they put a bit of effort these models will reach for building these one-off ephemeral or long-lived hyper-custom apps the same way they now reach for a python sandbox for basic arithmetics and statistics.
Looking for a flat? Scheduled task + CRM like artefact for it to monitor, maintain, and update.
Looking for holidays? Your own personal shareable moodboard with destinations and what not.
Have a use case or task for which chat or editing text docs is a frustrating way of correcting or giving feedback? Have it build a dedicated, custom artefact just for that.
When you encounter a use case where LLMs limits show, make them build tools.
Assistant booking a place for me is last thing I'd want, I want to see ratings, photos, overall look&feel of the place, not spin the wheel and get some random place booked
Why wouldn't a AI be able to show you those things?
I don't think sites like booking are at risk, as an assistant will just as likely use them. But there may be some kind of SEO tricks that companies like that could use to make LLM agents prefer them.
That said, I don't know about most of you but booking a hotel / flight is the kind of thing I do maybe once a year - it's too incidental (for me) to even consider automating.
That said, Google (search) is in trouble, although they're ready for it because their own AI products are solid and they already have the infrastructure and whatnot to run them, unlike e.g. Anthropic or OpenAI for who their AI products are their whole business. Likewise, Q&A sites like Stack Overflow, Quora are at risk.
Even Wikipedia is seeing less visitors, but I'm not too worried about that because visitor count isn't what they need to (or should) optimize for - their main risk is articles getting poisoned by LLM generated edits.
I very seldom use travel agencies, because the last thing I want is someone's else opinion on how my travel is supposed to be like.
> No need to book on Booking.com app if you can just have your assistant look for what you actually want.
Browsing through hotels is one of the best parts of the entire experience.
Interesting, for me it is the most annoying and hated one.
I prefer the part where you wait in airport or on train station over it.
Not saying I like being stuck at airport, but that is less annoying that selecting accommodations.
That and there would be a kind of service by Apple itself that builds apps for you on the fly.
I don't think we are anywhere near it yet but perhaps in the future the App Store is a single app that conjures up whatever you ask of it. It could be called "The Last One".
This is where I believe Apple is making a mistake by not going all in on AI.
People think it's some kind of genius move or very Apple-like move to not join the AI race.
But who is actually going to build apps on the fly better, faster for you? Siri or Opus 9? Siri or GPT 10 Astra?
When many tasks are done better on a single AI app, the iPhone moat will be greatly diminished which will open up competitors to iOS and Android.
> No need to book on Booking.com app if you can just have your assistant look for what you actually want.
There never was any need for these apps. A website works perfectly fine for simple use cases like that.
I think the single AI app will be thoroughly enshittified. You ask for a hotel and the assistant operator is normally getting 20% of your payment as a kickback, so it shows you the highest price it thinks you'll pay, but 40% if it's a certain chain so it only shows that chain. Everything will be like this.
Yes and no need to ever download a game anymore. Just ask your fucking AI to play it for you. Why waste time solving those stupid puzzles yourself?
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?
If I didn't release an update for a couple of months I would get people asking if the software is dead. It got to the point where I would do trivial releases just to make it look alive whether they were needed or not.
there are many apps but only few of them are worth it