How Long Do Apps Actually Last?

Let's start with the good news, because there's plenty of it. 13.8% of apps shipped an update in the last 30 days, and 45.2% did so within six months, so close to half the App Store has seen active maintenance inside half a year. The median app has been sitting on the store for about 3.8 years, and the oldest one in our index goes all the way back to 2008. This isn't a graveyard. It's a working city with a lot of active construction going on.

Now for the part nobody puts in the marketing copy. 29.5% of apps have not been updated in over two years, and 21.4% not in three. On iOS, that's close to a death certificate. Apple pushes out a major OS version every year that shuffles APIs, screen sizes, and privacy rules around, so an app that's sat through two or three of those cycles without a single update is almost certainly dead in the water. It might still open when you tap it, sure, but nobody's fixing its bugs, nobody's adapting it to your new phone, and whatever security holes have cropped up since the last release are just sitting there.

The cruel part is that an abandoned app looks identical to a healthy one in the store listing. Same icon, same screenshots, same rating frozen in time. The date is the only tell.

The store is not as young or as churning as people tend to assume. Line every app up by age and the one sitting right in the middle has been around 3.8 years. That spread runs wider than most people expect too: the youngest tenth of apps are under 0.4 of a year old, while the oldest tenth have been on the store for more than 11.2 years, reaching all the way back to the App Store's earliest days. A large share of what you're browsing today has sat in the catalogue for the better part of a decade.

Age by itself doesn't tell you much. Plenty of those veterans still get updated constantly. But it does change the question worth asking. Skip "how old is this app" and ask "has anyone touched it lately." An eight-year-old app updated last week works fine. A two-year-old app that's been untouched since launch does not.

Line apps up by the year they launched and a pattern falls out almost immediately: the older the app, the less likely anyone is still touching it. Look at apps that first launched in 2024 and are still listed today, and 54.3% shipped an update in the past year. Move to the 2020 group and that figure drops to 44.8%. By 2015, only 34.4% are still getting any maintenance at all. Roughly three in five apps from a decade ago have effectively gone quiet, even though they're still parked on the store taking up space.

What you're seeing here is survivorship playing out over years, not months. Nothing actually removes an abandoned app from the store, so it just sits there while newer apps launch and ship around it. The catalogue keeps filling up with older titles that are technically present but going nowhere fast, and this birth-year breakdown shows pretty clearly how that happens.

Abandonment doesn't hit every category the same way. Stickers comes out worst off, with 55.6% of its apps sitting untouched for two years or more, Games trailing close behind at 51.7%, and Books at 38.3%. Developers seem to build these throwaway titles once, push them live, then never look back.

Other categories can't afford to go stale. Finance tops the list with just 13.3% of apps left stagnant, followed by Magazines & Newspapers at 17.3% and Developer Tools at 18.1%. Once an app is tied to live data, money, or a backend that's constantly shifting, you simply can't walk away from it. The category polices itself.

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.

Two honest limits are worth flagging here. First, "updated recently" isn't the same thing as "improved recently": our figures only capture the date of the last release, not whether that release fixed real bugs or just bumped a version number. A fresh date tells you the app is alive, not that anyone cared for it. Second, we only count apps still listed in the store today. The ones Apple has already pulled are invisible in this data, so real abandonment across the App Store's history runs higher than any snapshot of surviving apps can show. Even so, every figure here, the 3.8-year median age, the 29.5% two-year-stale share, the birth-year cohorts, comes from a direct count across 906,806 apps, never a model.