Building an app
got cheap. Getting
chosen didn't.

How many apps are on the Shopify App Store now?

In July I wrote that the Shopify App Store had passed 25,000 apps, and told merchants to prune their stacks. In October 2026, Patrick Jakubik counted 29,245 live apps, with 2,861 launched in May alone. Most came from first-time partners, and 80% of this year's launches have no reviews. The July post was for merchants. This one is for the people building the apps.

Jakubik went through every live listing and posted what he found on X, and reading it is what made me write this. Other counts land a little differently: AppstorePulse had 2,713 May launches to his 2,861, and a Shopify developer forum thread put the store near 30,800 active apps the same month. Our own random sample of 400 live listings came out close to his numbers too. Each method counts a little differently and every one shows the same jump, so I'll use his figures.

I helped build and scale the Partner Program, and I watched the store go from a few hundred apps to over twelve thousand. For most of that time the hard part was building the app. That part is now close to free. What stayed expensive is the merchant's attention, and the thing on a listing that does most to earn it is proof that other merchants stayed.

The flood has also become a sore point. Developers, merchants and agencies are asking whether the store is being curated well enough for this volume. I still work inside this ecosystem every week and know how hard that job is. I get to that question after the numbers.

How fast is the Shopify App Store growing in 2026?

Launches ran at 500 to 700 a month for years, then hit 2,861 in May 2026 and haven't dropped below 1,500 a month since, per Jakubik's October 2026 count. That puts the store at 29,245 live apps from 18,376 partners. In July we wrote that it had passed 25,000.

Put another way, about half of everything live on the store today launched this year. Our sample found the same: 53% of the listings we drew were 2026 launches.

Nobody has published a cause for the May jump. My read is that it's the month AI coding tools were good enough that a working app, a listing and a billing setup became a weekend for one person. The zero-dollar first million in Shopify's revenue share already made the upside attractive. Cheap building on top of that pulled in 8,964 first-time partners in ten months.

Who is building all the new Shopify apps?

Mostly people who had never shipped one. In 2026, 82% of new apps came from first-time partners, per Jakubik: 8,964 new partners in ten months shipped 11,916 apps, while existing partners added 2,557. A small group ships apps in bulk, and those catalogs hold a large share of the empty listings.

One partner, he found, launched 86 apps this year and has one review to show for it. The top 12 publishers by volume shipped 384 apps between them and hold 10 reviews. AppstorePulse found the same shape in May, with a single developer at 151 live apps and 20 reviews.

If you're building a real product, those bulk publishers are noise a merchant has to filter more than they're competition, and the merchant filters with reviews, the badge and how recently an app was updated. That's good news if you have proof and bad news if you don't, because an app with no reviews looks the same as the 86.

Why do most new Shopify apps have zero reviews?

Mostly because reviews arrive slowly, and for a lot of apps they never arrive. Jakubik found 80% of 2026 launches have no reviews, against 5% of 2016 launches. In our own random sample of 400 live listings, 77% of 2026 launches have none. So do 68% of apps launched in 2025, which have had up to 22 months to get one.

Age helps, but slowly. In our sample the zero-review share falls with every older cohort: 52% for apps launched in 2024, 42% for 2022 and 2023, 39% for 2020 and 2021. Only among apps launched in 2019 or earlier does it drop to 12%. Four in ten surviving apps from 2020 to 2023 are still waiting on a first review three to six years in.

Waiting doesn't fix much. Only 1% of the 2026 apps we sampled have reached 20 reviews, in line with Jakubik's 114 for the whole year. If you don't earn reviews in your first year, plan on them coming slowly after that.

Reviews also aren't easier to buy than they used to be. Shopify's review-incentivization policy made trading app features for a review its own App Store rule, and apps that get caught lose a significant share of their reviews. I'd treat credits and discounts for reviews the same way. The honest route is the only safe one left, and it's slow.

How do you get reviews on a new Shopify app now?

Ask at the moment the app paid off, and ask the merchants who already said so. Only about 1 in 10 live apps got a single review in May 2026, per AppstorePulse, so a steady trickle already puts you ahead of most of the store. The goal is 20 real reviews before a merchant compares you with the next listing.

1. Find the win event. Pick the moment your app visibly earns its fee: the first recovered cart, the first synced order, the first report a merchant exports. Ask then, inside the app, not in a day-seven email.
2. Work your first 100 merchants by hand. They are research, not a funnel. The ones who reply to onboarding questions are the ones who will review you if you ask them personally.
3. Close the loop on support. A merchant whose ticket you fixed in an hour is the warmest reviewer you'll ever have. Ask at the end of that thread, once.
4. Never trade anything for a review. No feature unlocks, and I'd skip credits and extended trials too. Shopify strips reviews from apps it catches, and the penalty lands on the listing you spent months building.
5. Fix the listing before you buy traffic. If fewer than 3% of visits install, the proof or the first screen is the problem, and more visitors won't fix it.

None of this is new. It's the same playbook as our listing conversion guide, and it matters more at 29,000 apps, when about half the shelf launched this year with no track record yet.

Does putting AI in a Shopify app's name help?

Not on its own. In 2026, one in five new apps put AI in the name or tagline, up from one in sixteen in 2021, per Jakubik, and AppstorePulse found AI mentioned by 23.8% of May launches. When a fifth of the new shelf says the same word, the word stops telling a merchant anything. Our sample found it in 23% of 2026 titles.

Merchants buy outcomes, not features. "AI product descriptions" is a feature. "Product pages written in your brand voice, live in an afternoon" is an outcome, and it would still be true if the model behind it changed next quarter. Jakubik also counted 281 apps that list ChatGPT, OpenAI, Claude or Gemini as an integration. That tells you how many apps rent the same model, not which one is better.

The categories that are only a model with a settings page are the ones Shopify is most likely to fold into the platform, as I covered in how AI is reshaping Shopify apps. What lasts is depth: your own data, a workflow merchants come to rely on, or an integration nobody else built.

Where are Shopify apps built now, and what do they charge?

The US still ships the most, but its share of new apps fell from 25% to 21% this year and from 37% since 2016, per Jakubik. India has held about 15% throughout, while Pakistan and Turkiye doubled their share. The median monthly plan is $20, and it tracks where the app was built: $29 in the US, $15 in India, Pakistan and Vietnam.

Where this bites is commodity categories. If your app does what twenty others do, a team with lower costs can sell it at half your price and still do well. Matching $15 is a race you lose to whoever has the lowest costs. Sell an outcome a merchant can put a number on and price against that number, the approach in our app pricing benchmarks.

Is Shopify keeping up with the flood of new apps?

In a Shopify developer forum thread on October 8, 2026, one developer counted launches up about 10% in a month while new reviews fell about 4% and delisting warnings dropped by almost half. So more apps are arriving and fewer are leaving, and the developers who play by the rules feel that first.

The same thread is a fair sample of the mood. Developers describe merchants who rarely leave reviews even after good support, review requests that go unanswered, and a few reviews they say showed up for the merchant but never published. Merchants have their own version in the Shopify Community, in threads asking whether fake app reviews will ever be taken seriously. And the bulk publishers in Jakubik's data, one partner with 86 apps and a single review, are what everyone points to.

A lot of these new apps are noise, and I say that as someone who wants the store to keep growing. Every app should earn its spot with something the apps next to it don't have: a feature, an integration, a vertical it knows better, or a price that makes sense for a merchant. Twenty versions of the same countdown timer just make the good one harder for a merchant to find.

A smaller group goes past noise. I've come across approved apps whose FAQ or privacy policy still names the app they were copied from. The builder missed it when they submitted, review missed it too, and Shopify doesn't seem to be moving quickly to remove or penalize those listings. They're a minority of launches, and they're the clearest case for a firm response. Shopify has stood up for the intellectual property of the brands that sell on it, and its app partners deserve the same stance. A developer who spent two years building an app shouldn't find a copy of it in search, with their app's name still in the copy's privacy policy.

I've worked on the inside of this, and curating an app store at this volume is hard. Reviewing 600 submissions a month already took a real team. At 1,500 to 2,800 a month, most of them from people who have never shipped an app, every manual check turns into a queue. Shopify has acted, too. It pruned the store in 2024, when the count fell about 8%. It made trading features for reviews an App Store rule. And Built for Shopify gives merchants a quality signal they can read at a glance. Those tools were built for a smaller store, though, and the store isn't small anymore.

If I could put three asks in front of the App Store team, they'd be these. Let search weigh retention and recent reviews above keyword matches. Take a closer look at partners who publish dozens of near-identical apps, and remove listings that copy another app outright. And tell a developer when a review is held back, and why. None of that would slow down a good first-time builder, and all of it would make the shelf easier to trust for Shopify, for merchants and for every developer doing the work properly.

Until then, the practical answer for a builder is the rest of this post: don't count on the store sorting you to the top on merit. Build the proof and the distribution that get a merchant to pick you anyway.

What should Shopify app founders do differently in 2026?

Plan on merchants finding you somewhere else and checking you on the App Store. With more than 1,500 launches a month since May 2026, ranking in search for a broad term is close to a lottery for a new app, so the apps that grow bring their own merchants and use the listing to close them.

• Specialize before you broaden. A narrow app for one vertical can own a small search term and a small community, while a general one starts at zero against 29,000.
• Build distribution you own. Agency partners, integrations with apps merchants already run, and communities beat App Store ads. The distribution playbook lays out the channels.
• Count the review gap as a cost, and budget the first 20 reviews like a launch line item, with an owner and a date.
• Invest in the Shopify relationship. Built for Shopify sat at about 7% of live apps in May. In a crowded store, that badge is one of the few signals a merchant can read at a glance.
• Price against the outcome you deliver. If the median plan slides as more low-cost builders enter, don't follow it down.

If you're reading this from the merchant side, my July post on the store passing 25,000 apps covers your half: how to read a listing with no track record, and how to prune the stack you already have.

Questions app founders
ask about the 2026
App Store numbers.