When the App Store's Apps Were Born

The typical app on the store first showed up around 2022, and 63.6% of apps first appeared in 2021 or later. The App Store just doesn't hold still. New apps keep popping up while older ones quietly drop away. Most of what's available to download right now hasn't actually been around that long.

Just 4% of apps date back to 2008-2012, the App Store's earliest years, and yet they're still standing. An app that's survived that long has outlived countless competitors, OS overhauls, and business-model shifts along the way. Pair that kind of longevity with recent updates and you've got one of the rarer marks of quality you'll find in the store.

Look at the names behind those survivors and you'll spot some of the busiest apps on your phone. In our index, the most-rated app that launched in 2011 or earlier turns out to be Spotify: Music and Podcasts (2011), sitting at 41,984,253 ratings, with Instagram (2010) close behind at 29,459,235. Both showed up in the store's earliest years and never really gave up the top spot.

The apps that launched early and kept shipping updates ended up as the default pick, the one every rival still gets compared to. Showing up first bought them a head start. Years of steady updates turned that head start into something harder to catch. So if you find a listing with a launch date from the store's opening years paired with a rating count in the millions, you're basically looking at good timing backed up by a long stretch of consistent work.

Counting apps and counting attention give opposite pictures of who matters. The 2008–2012 cohort is only 4% of apps by number, yet it holds 34.3% of every star rating in the store — the single largest share of any era, from the smallest slice of apps. The newest wave, 2024 onward, is the reverse: a flood of fresh listings that together account for just 3.5% of ratings so far.

The gap per app is stark. An app born in the store's first years averages about 27,824 ratings; one born in 2024 onward averages roughly 277 — a difference of something like 100 to one. Age, on its own, is a proxy for accumulated audience: the veterans have simply had a decade and a half to gather users a newcomer has had months to find. It is why "how many ratings" and "how old" are really telling you two sides of the same story.

You'd figure maintenance would just decline in a straight line as apps get older, the older the app, the more neglected it gets. That's not what the numbers actually show. The newest apps are, unsurprisingly, the freshest: 81.4% of 2024 onward apps shipped an update in the last year, which makes sense given they were just built. But the low point doesn't belong to the oldest group. It belongs to the 2013–2016 middle stretch, where only 35.3% are still getting touched.

The store's originals are where things get interesting. The 2008–2012 cohort is more actively maintained (44.3%) than the 2013–2016 apps that came after it. That's survivorship bias doing its thing: most apps from that era died off long ago, and the ones still standing tend to be the well-funded, well-loved products that never stopped shipping. An app old enough to be a veteran and still getting updates has already cleared a filter that took out nearly everyone else from its generation.

Two honest limits. First, "release date" is when the app first appeared on the store, not when its current incarnation was built — apps get rewritten, rebranded, and handed to new owners while keeping their original date, so a 2009 launch date does not guarantee 2009 code. Second, we only see the apps still on the store today; every abandoned app that was removed is invisible here, which flatters the old cohorts (their survivors look healthier than the era really was). These figures describe the App Store as it stands now, across 916,984 apps with a known launch year, not the full history of everything ever published.