I was looking at this month’s App Store numbers (Sep 8 to Oct 8) and one thing jumped out that I think is worth flagging if you’re about to launch something.
New app launches were up about 10% for the month, and the store now sits around 30,800 active apps. So supply is clearly growing. But new reviews actually dropped ~4% over the same window, down to roughly 22,900.
What made it click for me was where everyone is building. Analytics led with 93 new apps this month, then Discounts, Legal and SEO all landed right behind it at around 75 each. If you’re launching into one of those, you’re entering the most crowded lane in a month where reviews got harder to earn.
One genuinely good sign in there: delisting and deletion warnings were down almost half from last period, so the store feels less like it’s actively purging apps right now. The pressure this month looks like it’s on the front end (standing out at launch), not the back end.
Has anyone launched recently and noticed reviews coming in slower than they expected?
They’re reluctant to leave reviews in the first place. Most merchants are ungrateful for the time we give them. Could that also be a sign that they’re less likely to leave a review?
Could be part of it, but I think it’s more that merchants are busy than ungrateful. Also, reviews dropped ~4% while new apps went up ~10%, so the same pool of reviews is getting split across more apps. Asking right after a support win has worked better for us than asking on day 1.
We’ve got merchants we’ve been working with for close to 2 years, there hasn’t been a single month without at least one email exchange. It’s always a positive outcome. Still they never leave a review despite asking them from time to time.
So if even those don’t leave a review, I don’t expect the 1 day users to leave a review.
I’ve got the same. It’s like the “If you have time, would you mind leaving a quick review?” part of my email is invisible. I sometimes wonder if they’re worried they’ll get less support once they’ve left a review?
We’ve noticed something similar with our two Shopify apps. Even after getting installs, reviews have been slower than we initially expected.
From my experience, getting visibility early on seems to be the bigger challenge now. There are so many apps competing for attention that simply launching isn’t enough — having a good launch strategy and continuously improving the app seems to make a big difference.
It’s when they leave a review, you never receive an email, it’s never published, they’re the only ones seeing it.
Because they see it online they think the review is published.
Yeah, that’s the hard part. Whenever a merchant mentions they left a review, look a few days later to see if it actually went live. It won’t catch everything, but it gives you real cases to send to Shopify.
Would love to hear what they say once yours is resolved.
It’s an uncomfortable truth, but AI has commoditized coding so much that the technical moat that used to give you an edge is completely destroyed.
I have a feeling that selling on the app store will be become the same as selling on Amazon. All products look the same, feel the same and everyone will be competing down to 0.
That’s a really good point, and it might explain part of the ~4% drop I saw. If some reviews never get published, the drop could be partly about visibility, not only about merchants reviewing less.
