“how has the volume of apps on the apple app store increased in the past 4 years, and what has the quality (star-rating, downloads) of those apps been?”
Year-end catalog totals for 2022–2025 come from Apple's App Store Transparency Reports (apps listed at year end); release and download volumes are Sensor Tower estimates in billions and thousands of apps; rating figures are separate snapshots with different scopes. 2026 is incomplete and excluded.
The store added 210,876 listings in 2025 alone — more than the previous two years combined — as releases jumped ~30% to about 600,000.
Worldwide App Store downloads rose only 3% to 35.4 billion in 2025 (9to5mac.com), implying about 34.4 billion in 2024.
A rough throughput measure — aggregate downloads divided by year-end inventory — falls from about 17,500 downloads per listed app in 2024 to about 16,300 in 2025, down roughly 7%. This is an ecosystem average, not the download count of a typical app: downloads are highly uneven and Apple publishes no app-level counts.
Average across top categories and countries; 78% of top-3 ranked apps rate 4+ stars. Measures visible, ranked apps — not the catalog. netpeak.us
973,514 apps rated vs 1,570,995 not yet rated (~38.3% rated) — the long tail mostly has no rating. Tracked-catalog definition differs from Apple's year-end total. 42matters.com
Statista snapshot of highest-ranking apps on search results pages; different sample and method, not comparable to the 2023 study. statista.com
Defensible reading: visible apps tend to rate well, while a majority of the broad catalog may have no rating at all. None of these figures measure technical quality, safety, or usefulness.
| Year | Apps at year end | Growth | New releases (est.) | Downloads (est.) | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 1,783,232 | — | ~420,000 | — | phonearena.com |
| 2023 | 1,870,119 | +4.9% | — | — | macrumors.com |
| 2024 | 1,961,596 | +4.9% | ~462,000 (implied) | ~34.4B (implied) | discussions.apple.com |
| 2025 | 2,172,472 | +10.8% | ~600,000 | 35.4B | app-store-operator.com |
Method: catalog totals are apps listed at year end in Apple's annual App Store Transparency Reports (2022–2025), taken from pages quoting the exact figures; release and download volumes are Sensor Tower estimates reported by secondary press, with 2024 values implied from stated year-over-year changes and labeled as such. Rating snapshots come from three sources with incompatible scopes and dates, so no star trend is drawn. Built from five result sets (9, 6, 100, 240 and 26 rows) covering 2022–2025; extracted 2026-09; category-specific and non-worldwide download rows were cut. Downloads per listed app is aggregate downloads ÷ year-end inventory, not a typical app's downloads.