When the App Store's Apps Were Born

Half the apps in the App Store first showed up around 2022, and 63.2% of apps first appeared in 2021 or later. New apps keep arriving while older ones get pulled from the store, so whatever you're browsing today tends to skew young.

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.

Name those survivors and you land on some of the most-used apps on your phone. Look at titles in our index that launched in 2011 or earlier and one app leads the pack: Spotify: Music and Podcasts (2011) holds 41,858,162 ratings, with Instagram (2010) close behind at 29,430,884. Neither app is coasting on nostalgia. Both showed up in the store's earliest years and never really gave up the top spot.

The apps that got in early and kept pushing updates became the ones everyone else now has to measure themselves against. Showing up first bought them room to grow. Sticking around and improving turned that room into a wall other apps can't really climb. So when you spot a launch date from the store's opening years next to a rating count in the millions, you're really looking at two things working together: good timing and just not stopping.

Line up the number of apps against the attention they've pulled in, and two rankings emerge that barely resemble each other. Apps from the 2008 to 2012 cohort make up just 4% of everything in the store, but they've soaked up 34.4% of every star rating ever left, the biggest chunk of any era despite being the thinnest slice of apps on offer. The newest wave, 2024 onward, lands at the opposite extreme: a flood of fresh listings that together account for a mere 3.4% of ratings so far.

Break it down per app and the gap gets almost absurd. An app from the store's earliest years pulls in around 27,775 ratings on average, while one launched in 2024 or later averages something like 275, roughly a 101 to one difference. Age basically stands in for accumulated audience: older apps have had a decade and a half to build up a following, while a newcomer has had only a few months to make its case. Rating counts and app age are, in the end, just two ways of telling the same story.

Maintenance doesn't decline in a neat line as apps get older, and that's the odd part. The newest apps sit well ahead of the pack: 81.7% of 2024 onward apps shipped an update in the last year, which makes sense given how new they are. But the least active group turns out to be the 2013 to 2016 stretch in the middle, not the oldest apps. Only 35.3% of those are still getting touched.

The real surprise is at the other end of the timeline. Developers actually keep the 2008 to 2012 cohort more active (44.3%) than the 2013 to 2016 group that came right after it. Survivorship is the reason: most apps from that early era disappeared long ago, and what's left are the well-funded, well-loved products that never really stopped shipping. An app old enough to be called a veteran, and still receiving updates, has already survived a filter that wiped out nearly everything else from its generation.

Two honest limits here. The "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 guarantees nothing about the code running today. And we can only see what's still on the store now. Abandoned apps that got pulled are invisible in this data, which flatters the older cohorts, since their survivors end up looking healthier than the era really was. These figures describe the App Store as it stands today, across 899,137 apps with a known launch year, not the full history of everything that was ever published.