When the App Store's Apps Were Born

Half the apps in the store trace back to 2023, and 66.2% of apps first appeared in 2021 or later. New entries keep popping up while older ones quietly disappear, so most of what you can download today just hasn't been around that long.

That said, 3.7% of apps date back to 2008–2012, back when the store was just getting started. An app still hanging around after all that time has survived countless competitors, OS overhauls, and business-model shifts along the way. Longevity like that, especially when paired with recent updates, is honestly one of the rarer signs of quality you'll find in the store.

Scroll back to the store's earliest days and you'll run into some of the most familiar names still sitting on your phone. In our index, the most-rated app launched in 2011 or earlier is Spotify: Music and Podcasts (2011), sitting at 42,792,964 ratings. Instagram (2010) follows close behind with 29,642,164. That kind of staying power isn't just habit. These apps showed up in the store's first years and never really left the top.

The developers who got there early and kept shipping updates ended up setting the defaults everyone else has to compete with now. Being first gave them a head start, sure, but it was the constant iteration afterward that turned that head start into something harder to catch. So when you come across a listing with a launch date from the store's opening years and a rating count in the millions, you're looking at that rare mix of good timing and real staying power.

Count the apps one way, then count the attention they get, and you land on two completely different pictures of who actually matters. The 2008 to 2012 cohort is a small group, just 3.7% of apps by number, but it holds 34.1% of every star rating in the store, the largest share of any era even though it's the thinnest slice of the app population. The newest crop, apps from 2024 onward, moves in the opposite direction: a wave of fresh listings that together account for only 3.8% of ratings so far.

Per app, the gap is almost absurd. An app from the store's earliest years averages about 26,083 ratings, while one launched in 2024 or later averages close to 246, roughly a 106 to one difference. Age ends up doing the work of a proxy for audience size: an older app has had a decade and a half to build a following, while a newcomer has had only a few months to chase one. That's really why "how many ratings" and "how old" are telling you nearly the same story from two different angles.

If you assume maintenance fades in a tidy, predictable slope as apps age, the numbers here will throw you off. Newer apps lead the pack, which makes sense given they only just arrived: 81.1% of 2024 onward apps shipped an update in the last year. The surprise is where the curve bottoms out. It is not the oldest apps in the store. That distinction goes to the 2013–2016 cohort, where only 35.2% are still getting updates.

The real outlier is the store's oldest batch, which refuses to follow the expected pattern. Apps from 2008–2012 get updated more often, 43.8% of them, than the supposedly "younger" 2013–2016 group. Survivorship is the reason. Nearly everything released in that first wave has long since vanished, so what's left are the apps with real backing and loyal users, the ones that never stopped shipping updates. By the time an app has aged into veteran status and is still being maintained, it has already outlasted a brutal filter that erased most of its generation.

Two honest limits are worth flagging here. First, "release date" marks when the app first showed up on the store, not when its current version was actually built. Apps get rewritten, rebranded, and handed off to new owners while keeping their original date, so a 2009 launch date is no guarantee you're looking at 2009 code. Second, we can only see what's still on the store today. Every abandoned app that got pulled sits outside this data, which makes the older cohorts look better than they really were, since only the survivors stick around to be counted. So these numbers describe the App Store as it stands right now, across 1,050,525 apps with a known launch year, not the full history of everything that was ever published.