App stores · Data
The App Store gets 93,000 new apps a month. Downloads grew 2%.
The App Store added about 560,000 new apps in the first half of 2026, twice as many as a year before. Downloads grew 2%. What that means for yours.
Building an app has never been easier. Getting it downloaded has not become any easier at all. Here are the numbers, where each of them comes from, and what they mean if you have just launched an app.
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560,000
new apps on Apple's App Store in the first half of 2026 — twice as many as a year earlier
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93,000
new apps a month on the App Store alone: more than 3,000 a day
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+2%
more App Store downloads over the same six months
About 93,000 new apps a month
Sensor Tower, a company that measures the app stores, counted about 560,000 new apps on Apple's App Store in the first half of 2026: twice as many as in the same six months of 2025, and almost as many as in the whole of 2025, when about 600,000 arrived. That is about 93,000 new apps a month — more than 3,000 a day, on Apple's store alone.
And the pace is still picking up. In the first quarter, 235,800 new apps went live on the App Store, 84% more than a year earlier — the fastest growth Sensor Tower had seen in four years. Appfigures, which tracks both stores, measured the same thing: new releases on the App Store and Google Play together were up 60% in the first quarter, and up 104% in April.
Google Play adds tens of thousands more. At the time of writing, the tracker 42matters counts 92,704 apps added to Google Play and 117,924 added to the App Store in the last month.
The trackers name the same cause: AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and Replit, with which people who have never programmed build a working app in days, not months.
Downloads grew 2%
The downloads did not double along with the apps. In the first half of 2026, App Store downloads grew 2%, to 17.6 billion. In 2025 they grew 3%, to 35.4 billion — in a year when the number of new apps grew 30%.
Twice as many new apps, in other words, now compete for downloads that barely grew.
Most apps get a handful of downloads a day
How thinly those downloads are spread shows in an analysis of both stores by Appfigures from 2023 — before the flood began. Of all the apps that were downloaded more than 100 times in a month:
- 47.7% got between 100 and 1,000 downloads — at most about 33 a day
- 33.3% got between 1,000 and 10,000
- 0.5% got between one and ten million, and just 21 apps got more
That puts 8 in 10 of them under 10,000 downloads a month. And the apps that were downloaded fewer than 100 times are not in these figures at all.
At the top, the club is small. In 2024, Appfigures counted 1,408 apps and games that get more than a million downloads a month, across both stores. Google Play alone lists about 2.6 million apps. Fewer than one app in a thousand gets there.
Why a new app goes unseen
An app store is a search box first. Apple says it ranks App Store search results by how well an app's title, subtitle, keywords and category match the search, and by user behaviour: downloads, ratings and reviews. A new app starts with no downloads, no ratings and no reviews. Publishing it puts it in the store; it does not put it in front of anyone.
The stores are also pushing back against the flood. In June 2026 Apple tightened its review guidelines, which now say: "Don't submit apps that are indistinguishable from what's already widely available." In crowded categories — Apple names dating, flashlights, sound effects, wallpapers, simple timers and fortune telling — it now says it may remove apps that "are not updated, improved, or do not attract customers" (MacRumors covered the change).
So the question for a new app is not how to get into the store. It is how people hear about it before they ever open the store.
What to do if you have just launched an app
- Write your store page for the words people search for. Your app's name, subtitle and keywords decide which searches it appears in, and the screenshots decide whether anyone taps. This is called app store optimisation, or ASO.
- Give your app a page on the web that says plainly what it does. Google and assistants like ChatGPT can only recommend what they can read: what the app does, who it is for and what it costs. Our free ChatGPT visibility check shows in a minute whether ChatGPT names your site.
- Go where your users already are. The communities, forums, newsletters and creators your future users follow are worth more in the first months than the store's search.
- Try ads with a small budget. A few euros a day on search or social ads quickly show which words and which pictures bring installs, and which don't.
- Look at the numbers every week. Which channel brought installs, and which brought people who stayed? Do more of what works, and stop what doesn't.
Most of this is what Quaryan does for any app. Start free, add your app by its App Store or Google Play link, and you get your store page, the words to target, your website for Google and ChatGPT, and your ads — written out, ready to publish, and checked again every Monday.
Sources
- App Store added nearly as many new apps in H1 2026 as in all of 2025 — 9to5Mac, 20 July 2026, citing Sensor Tower
- App Store sees 84% surge in new apps as AI coding tools take off — 9to5Mac, 6 April 2026, citing Sensor Tower
- The App Store is booming again, and AI may be why — TechCrunch, 18 April 2026, citing Appfigures
- The App Store Just Logged Its Biggest Release Year in Nearly a Decade — Appfigures, 5 December 2025
- Google Play Statistics and Trends 2026 — 42matters, updated continuously
- iOS Apple App Store Statistics and Trends 2026 — 42matters, updated continuously
- By the Numbers: Analyzing App Downloads in the App Store and Google Play — Appfigures, 14 July 2023
- How Many Apps and Games Get More Than 1,000,000 Downloads Every Month? — Appfigures, 31 May 2024
- App Store search — Apple Developer
- App Review Guidelines, 4.3 Spam — Apple, last updated 8 June 2026
- Apple Updates App Store Guidelines With Stricter Rules for Low-Quality Apps — MacRumors, 9 June 2026