Mirakle Research · June 14, 2026
How many apps launch on the Shopify App Store?
In June 2009, a small app called FetchApp became the first thing ever listed on the Shopify App Store. Seventeen years later there are 22,238 of them still standing — and they are arriving faster than at any point in the store's history. This is every week of that climb.
Hold the shape of that line in your head, because the scale is hard to feel. In the single week of May 4, 2026, 926 apps launched — more than the entire store managed in its first five years combined (107 apps, 2009–2013). Zoom out to the month: 3,015 apps launched in May 2026 alone, nearly three times the 1,045 that launched in the store's first nine years put together. The App Store didn't grow into this. It detonated.
The long climb
Every year bigger than the last
Strip the noise out and the annual totals tell a clean story of compounding growth. Five apps launched in 2009. A hundred-odd a year by the mid-2010s. Then the line bends: roughly a thousand a year by 2020, double that by 2023, and 4,980 in 2025. 2026 isn't even half over and it has already produced 6,442 — more than any full year before it.
Stack those years on top of each other and you get the size of the living store over time — and a genuinely startling fact about when today's App Store was built. Of the 22,238 apps on the store right now, 51% launched after the start of 2025. Half of everything you can install today went live after February 2025. The store you browse is mostly new.
One honest caveat before we go further, because it changes how you should read every chart here: we can only see apps that still exist. An app that launched in 2013 and was pulled in 2018 left no trace we can count. So the early bars are lower bounds — the real 2009 was bigger than five — and the true acceleration is gentler than the raw survivor counts suggest. But survivorship cuts the other way too: it means the recent surge is, if anything, understated relative to history, because the new apps simply haven't had time to disappear yet.
The step change
What happened after April 20, 2026
On April 20, 2026, Shopify switched on AI-assisted review in its app submission pipeline. For the first fifteen weeks of 2026, launches had been remarkably steady — a median of about 147 a week. Then the floor dropped out. Within two weeks the weekly count had passed 400; the week of May 4 peaked at 926 — a 6.3× jump over the pre-April baseline — and it has since settled into a new plateau of roughly 598 a week, several times higher than anything that came before.
Is AI review the cause? We should be careful — correlation in a time series is cheap, and our own observation window happens to open the same week the surge begins. But two things make a coincidence hard to believe. First, the launch dates are read straight from each Shopify listing, they cluster on weekdays (Shopify's reviewers approve on business days), and the elevated rate has now held for weeks, not days — this is a sustained plateau, not a one-off blip. Second, the timing is almost too neat: a faster, cheaper approval pipeline is exactly the kind of change that would let a backlog of submissions clear at once and then keep a permanently higher throughput. The most plausible reading is that Shopify didn't suddenly get more developers — it got a faster door.
The catch
More apps, fewer users
A faster door has a side effect. Track the share of each launch cohort that has still never received a single review — the crudest possible proxy for "did anyone actually install this?" — and the trend is relentless. Of apps launched in 2018, only 9% sit at zero reviews today. For the 2025 cohort it's 57%. For apps launched in 2026, it is 82.8%.
Some of that is simply age — a brand-new app hasn't had time to earn a review yet. But the slope is far too steep for age alone, and it bends upward exactly as the volume explodes. The store isn't just launching more apps; it's launching more apps that, so far, no merchant has bothered to talk about. Quantity went vertical. Traction did not.
The mix
What everyone is building
The boom is broad, not the work of one runaway category. But some corners of the store have grown from almost nothing. Analytics leads the recent wave with 699 launches since 2024, up from just 32 in the store's entire pre-2018 era. Whole categories that barely existed a decade ago — page builders, workflow automation, 3D/AR, "product content" — now ship dozens of new apps a month.
Plot the largest categories over time and you can watch the curves all bend upward together around 2020 and then again, harder, in 2025–26. Analytics and SEO — the two most crowded shelves on the store — are also the two pulling away fastest. If you are a merchant, the catalogue in front of you is wider and more duplicated than it has ever been.
A small tell
Apps launch on a schedule
One last detail that confirms these dates are real, human approvals and not some artifact: apps almost never go live on a weekend. Listings cluster hard on Monday through Friday and all but vanish on Saturday and Sunday — the signature of a review team that works business hours. It's a small thing, but it's the kind of texture you only see in genuine data.
Where it began
The first apps on the shelf
It is worth remembering how small this started. Before the 22,238 apps and the 900-a-week peaks, there were these — the earliest listings still on the store today. Accounting connectors, a shipping tool, a digital-downloads app. Plumbing for a platform that didn't yet know what it would become.
- FetchApp Digital products
- FreshBooks Link by CarryTheOne Accounting
- KashFlow Connector by CTO Accounting
- OrderCup Shipping
- Xero Connector by CarryTheOne Accounting
- Directed Edge Recommender Upsell and cross-sell
How this was measured
- Based on the 22,238 apps listed on the Shopify App Store as of June 14, 2026, counted by the launch date Shopify publishes on each listing.
- Survivorship is the big blind spot. We only observe apps that still exist, so apps launched and later delisted are invisible. Early-year counts are therefore lower bounds, and the raw long-run acceleration is an upper bound on the real one.
- Our scraper began observing the store on April 27, 2026. New apps are captured within a day or two of launch, so recent coverage is near-complete — but the final week or two are right-censored (the newest launches aren't discovered yet) and shown dashed and excluded from the baseline and plateau figures.
- "Zero reviews" counts apps with no review on their listing today; for the youngest cohorts this partly reflects age, not only traction. The AI-review timing is correlational — we observe a sustained step change aligned with the April 20, 2026 rollout, not a proven cause.
Independent research by Mirakle. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Shopify or any app or developer named above.