How Long Do Apps Actually Last?

Here's the good news first. 13.3% of apps shipped an update in the last 30 days, and 46% did so within six months, so close to half of the App Store has been touched by a developer in the past six months. The median app has sat on the store for about 3.4 years now, and the oldest one we found in our index goes back to 2008. A lot of these apps are clearly still being worked on.

Here's the part most app store roundups skip. 28.2% of apps have not been updated in over two years, and 20.6% not in three. On iOS, that gap is close to a death certificate. Apple ships a major OS version every year, one that changes APIs, screen sizes, and privacy rules, so an app that's sat through two or three of those cycles without a single update is almost certainly dead on the backend. It might still open when you tap it, but nobody's fixing its bugs, nobody's adapting it to your new phone, and nobody's patching its security holes.

The store listing hides all of this. An abandoned app sits next to a healthy one with the same icon, the same screenshots, the same rating frozen in time. Check the update date before you trust either one.

Line up every app by age and the App Store looks nothing like the churning, youth-obsessed place people make it out to be. The app sitting right at the midpoint has been live for 3.4 years. And the spread between old and new is wider than you'd guess: the youngest tenth of apps are under 0.4 of a year old, while the oldest tenth have been sitting on the store for more than 11.1 years, reaching all the way back to the App Store's earliest days. Scroll through the catalogue and a huge chunk of what you're looking at has been there for the better part of a decade.

Age on its own doesn't tell you much. Plenty of those older apps still ship updates constantly. What actually matters is whether anyone's touched the app recently, not how old it happens to be. An eight-year-old app that got an update last week is in good shape. A two-year-old app nobody's touched since launch isn't.

Line up apps by launch year and the pattern jumps out immediately: the older the app, the less likely anyone's still touching it. Apps that first went live in 2024 and are still listed had a 52.8% chance of shipping an update in the past year. Step back to apps from 2020 and that figure falls to 44.8%. Go back further to 2015 and only 34.4% are still getting maintained. Roughly three in five apps from a decade ago have effectively gone silent, even though they're still sitting there in the store.

What you're seeing is survivorship stretched out over years. Nobody pulls an abandoned app down, so it just sits there untouched while newer apps keep stacking up around it. The catalogue ends up full of older titles that are technically still available but functionally frozen, and that's where the birth-year gradient shows up most clearly.

Abandonment doesn't hit every category the same way. Stickers fares worst, with 56% of apps left untouched for two years or more, and Games (49.7%) and Books (36.8%) aren't far behind. These corners of the store are full of build-once novelties and simple titles that developers tend to walk away from right after launch.

Other categories stay current because they don't really have a choice. Finance is the best-maintained of the bunch, with only 12.8% stale, and Developer Tools (17.4%) and Graphics & Design (17.9%) come in close behind. When an app runs on live data, money, or a backend that keeps shifting underneath it, developers can't afford to let it sit still.

Every App Store listing shows the last update date, and almost nobody bothers to look. That's a mistake, honestly, because it tells you more than a star rating ever could. A rating average reflects how the app felt to people months or even years ago. The update date tells you whether anyone's still in there working on it right now. If an app touches your money, your health, or your personal data, an old update date should make you think twice. An unmaintained finance or medical app isn't just inconvenient. It's a risk.

A small group of apps break from this pattern: veterans that have kept shipping updates for a decade straight, no gaps. They're rare enough that we keep dedicated boards to track them, since a decade of steady maintenance is about as clear a trust signal as you'll find in a developer.

The best case for checking the update date shows up in the small set of apps that get it right. A few of the oldest titles in the store, first published back in 2008, were still pushing out updates within the last few months apps like Apartment Guide Home Rentals, Collins Spanish-English, Basic Math. Something like eighteen years on the store, and someone is still tending them.

That is the profile worth trusting: not the newest app, not the highest rated one, but the one that has kept the lights on year after year. A launch date from the App Store's earliest days paired with an update date from this month is about as strong a reliability signal as a listing can give you.

A couple of honest caveats are worth spelling out here. First, "updated recently" doesn't mean "improved recently." Our figures track the date of the last release, not whether that release fixed real bugs or just bumped a version number, so a fresh date tells you an app is alive, not that anyone cared for it properly. Second, we only count apps still listed in the store today. Anything Apple has already pulled is invisible to us, which means actual abandonment across the App Store's history almost certainly runs higher than any snapshot of surviving apps could ever show. Still, every figure here, the 3.4-year median age, the 28.2% two-year-stale share, the birth-year cohorts, comes from counting directly across 1,054,653 apps. None of it is modelled.