How Long Do Apps Actually Last?

The good news deserves a spot up front. 9.8% of apps shipped an update in the last 30 days, and 44.7% did so within six months, so close to half the App Store has had a developer touch it in that window. The median app has sat on the store for about 3.6 years, and the oldest one still standing in our index dates back to 2008. That's not a graveyard. It's more like a city with construction crews working on half the blocks at once.

Nobody puts this part in the marketing copy. 28.9% of apps have not been updated in over two years, and 21% not in three. On iOS, that's close to a death certificate. Apple ships a major OS version every year, one that rewrites 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 in the water. It might still open when you tap it, but nobody's fixing its bugs, nobody's adjusting it for your new phone, and nobody's patching whatever security holes it's picked up along the way.

An abandoned app looks exactly like a healthy one in the store listing: same icon, same screenshots, same rating frozen in time. The only giveaway is the date.

There's this assumption that App Store apps come and go fast. But line every app up by age and the one sitting in the middle is 3.6 years old. And the spread is bigger than you'd think: 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 11.1 years, stretching all the way back to the App Store's earliest days. So a lot of what you're scrolling through today has been sitting in the catalogue for the better part of a decade.

Age by itself doesn't really tell you much, though. Plenty of those older apps still get updated all the time. What matters more is whether anyone's actually touched the thing recently. An eight-year-old app that got an update last week is fine. A two-year-old app nobody's opened since launch isn't.

Line up apps by the year they launched and a pretty blunt pattern shows up: the older the app, the less likely it's still being touched. Of the apps first released in 2024 that are still listed, 52.9% shipped an update in the past year. Drop back to the 2020 class and that figure falls to 44.4%, and by 2015 only 34.1% are still getting any maintenance at all. Roughly three in five apps from a decade ago have basically gone silent, even though they never actually left the shelf.

It's survivorship, just stretched out over years instead of days. Nobody bothers pulling an abandoned app from the store, so it just sits there while developers move on and newer titles keep piling in around it. The catalogue ends up full of older apps that are technically present but functionally frozen solid, and sorting by launch year is about the cleanest way to watch that show up.

Not every category lets its apps gather dust at the same speed. Stickers sits at the bottom, where 55.2% of apps have sat untouched for two years or more, with Games (51%) and Books (37.9%) close behind. These categories fill up with build-once novelties and simple titles, so developers ship once and walk away.

Other categories won't sit still. Finance sits at the top, with only 13.2% stale, and Magazines & Newspapers (17.6%) and Developer Tools (17.7%) close behind. Apps tied to live data, money, or a backend that keeps shifting force developers to keep pace, so the category ends up policing its own freshness.

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. First, "updated recently" isn't the same thing as "improved recently": our figures capture the date of the last release, not whether that release fixed real bugs or just bumped a version number, so a fresh date proves 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 sit outside this dataset entirely, so real abandonment across the App Store's history runs higher than any surviving-app snapshot can show. Every figure here, the 3.6-year median age, the 28.9% two-year-stale share, the birth-year cohorts, comes from counting directly across 975,179 apps. Nothing here is modelled.