One in ten top-charting App Store apps now advertise AI
App Store 2026 in numbers: AI, pricing, abandoned apps
Obelisk Club analyzed 178,637 apps that hit App Store top charts across 173 countries since October 9, 2026. Nearly 10% mention AI in their listing, rising to 43% in Graphics & Design, and apps selling subscriptions or in-app purchases are three times as likely to do so. A fifth of charted apps haven't been updated in a year or more, and subscription and price complaints top the list of one- and two-star review gripes.
In 1-2 star reviews the most common complaint is subscription & price (12.7%), ahead of bugs & broken features (10.9%) and login & account (10%).
- bemtevi
I wish there was a filter in the app store to filter and only show apps that having nothing to do with AI. It's become increasingly hard to find a decent, non-AI app these days.
- heliographe
I’m an indie developer in one of the categories mentioned as being AI heavy (Photo & Video).
I’ve been shipping apps since way before vibe coding (https://heliographe.studio), and it’s been a pretty speedy transition in terms of how the market has shifted in the last 12 months.
Making a high quality camera/photo app used to require a lot of fairly advanced skills: UI design & engineering for the core app, an understanding of signal processing/color transforms/etc for producing the final image, graphics programming to keep everything rendering smooth in the preview (especially if you have advanced features like focus peaking, scopes/histograms, etc)…
It used to be that if you shipped a polished camera app, you would get at least a bit of attention just on those merits.
But in the last year it has become utterly trivial for anyone to make a camera app, and every week there are dozens of new entrants on the market (most of them claim to do their own unique non-AI, film-like processing).
But of those, which has gotten the most attention? I’d argue it’s the just released Chromagraph, designed in part by Rian Johnson of Star Wars fame.
https://www.theverge.com/tech/1025659/rian-johnson-chromagra...
If you compare it to every other camera app released recently, I’d argue it’s pretty average in terms of features/output quality. But that name recognition is what drives downloads more than ever.
- ddxv
The 'abandoned' apps are also often actively advertising, so possibly they do something that causes it. I see tens of thousands of apps churn like that a month. They're not some quite app that a developer stopped updating, but something actively having ads bought for it that is then taken off market.
For example these apps advertising in October 2026
https://appgoblin.info/reports/ad-user-acquisition-2026-octo...
And some of them, like the block game are already gone:
https://appgoblin.info/apps/com.game.best.mini.pro.dragon.ra...
This link is currently not active:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.game.best....
- Bengalilol
11.5% of "free shopping apps sell in-app purchases or subscriptions", that spunned my curiosity.
What could be those apps:
- resale/second hand apps that offer boosts to be seen?
- apps that sell alert systems when a price is dropping?
- grocery/listing apps that sell "no ads" functionalities?
- gated brands with VIP things?
Yet, 11.5% looks enormous. I may be old.
- q2dg
Very interesting, thanks!
Could bé another similar report about Google's App Store?
Thanks again!