There’s a thread going around about Sidekick only ever recommending a handful of apps, and a fair counter-question came up under it: maybe installs are down across the board because the market itself slowed - fewer new stores, more merchants spinning up custom AI apps.
So I checked the one part that’s actually measurable: is the overall pie shrinking? It isn’t.
- New reviews across the store (a reasonable proxy for install activity) are up roughly 10-15% year over year through 2026 - about 21.7k/month across Mar-Sep 2025 versus 24.9k/month for the same months in 2026. The only month that fell was October 2026, which matches the app-delisting wave rather than a real slowdown.
- New merchants also keep arriving: over the last ~20 months, roughly two-thirds of all new reviews came from first-time reviewers, about 520 a day leaving their first-ever app review. That is not the pattern of a market that has stopped growing.
So if you’re outside the top few and watching installs fall, the data points away from a shrinking market and toward redistribution - similar volume funneled into fewer apps.
That fits how discovery changed. Shopify’s own Sept 2025 changelog says Sidekick surfaces “up to three relevant app cards for broad queries", and that the Built for Shopify badge improves ranking in both the App Store and Sidekick. A three-slot funnel weighted partly by a badge is a very different surface from a browsable category page.
One honest limit: the public data shows the pie is growing, but not how much the top 3 in each category capture over time. That’s the piece that would confirm or rule out the concentration theory.
So, to the people who’d know, if your installs dropped this year, are you in or out of the top 3 for your main keyword, and did the timing line up with Sidekick taking over recommendations?
Again, the data source is from Letsmetrix.