Six things to take away
If you only read one block, read this one. Every bullet starts with a number.
- 2,318 apps launched on the Shopify App Store in July 2026, up 15.8% over June and the busiest launch month since May.
- 30,832 new reviews were posted in July, up 15.1% over June, measured from the daily change in every app's listed review count, full month coverage on both sides.
- ~30,500 reviews were removed by Shopify in July, its biggest moderation purge of the year, nearly 10× June's removal volume, wiping out almost exactly what merchants posted. Net listed reviews barely moved.
- 1,007,145 reviews have now been indexed all-time: the App Store crossed the one-million-review mark in July, with 1,003,196 of them on the 25,780 currently live apps.
- 25.4% of July launches mention AI, vs 20.3% of the installed base. The base is catching up fast (19.8% a month ago), so the launch-vs-base gap is narrowing: 1.25× today vs 1.33× in June.
- 1,622 apps now carry the Built for Shopify badge. That's more badges than June, but a smaller share (6.3% vs 6.7%), the catalogue is growing faster than Shopify hands out badges.
- 75.6% of live apps are English-only. Localization remains the largest, cheapest, most-ignored optimization on the App Store.
The App Store today
The Shopify App Store now hosts 25,780 live public apps with 1,003,196 reviews across them at an average rating of 4.67 stars.
Free vs paid split
66% of live apps offer at least one free plan; 34% are paid-only. The Shopify App Store is structurally a freemium marketplace.
Built for Shopify adoption
Only 1,622 apps (6.3%) carry the Built for Shopify badge, Shopify's mark of technical and UX quality. The other 94% of the catalogue don't, which is what makes the badge a real differentiator on a crowded store, and the share actually fell this month as launches outpaced new badges.
July in numbers
2,318 apps launched (+15.8%) and 62 apps were removed in July 2026, the busiest launch month since May. Merchants posted 30,832 new reviews, up 15.1% over June, and Shopify removed almost exactly as many in its biggest moderation purge of the year.
New reviews posted, June vs July
Measured from the daily index: the sum of every app's increase in listed review count over the month, the same method for both months, with full month coverage on both sides. Merchants posted 30,832 reviews in July vs 26,797 in June, growth that tracks the +15.8% jump in launches.
Who's getting reviewed
2,554 distinct apps received at least one individually indexed review in July, roughly 1 in 10 live apps. The new reviews themselves skewed positive: an average of 4.83 stars, slightly above the all-time mean of 4.67.
The AI surge
AI mentions are 1.25× over-represented in July launches: 25.4% of new apps mention AI, vs 20.3% of the installed base, and the base itself climbed from 19.8% a month ago.
Share of apps mentioning AI
The interesting move this month is in the gap: new launches still skew AI, but at 1.25× the installed base vs 1.33× in June. AI isn't cooling, it's becoming the baseline: the installed base is filling with AI apps faster than launches can outrun it.
Methodology note: this counts the literal token "AI" (and related forms like "AI-powered") in an app's name, tagline, or description. It's a proxy for marketed as AI, not for what the app technically does under the hood.
Categories: where the apps are
Analytics is the single largest category on the Shopify App Store, with 1,230 live apps, and it was also the most-launched category in July, with 145 new entries.
Top 10 categories by total live apps
Snapshot as of 31 July 2026.
- 1.1,230 appsAnalytics
- 2.870 appsSEO
- 3.856 appsChat
- 4.806 appsDiscounts
- 5.793 appsShipping
- 6.617 appsUpsell and cross-sell
- 7.530 appsDropshipping
- 8.472 appsInventory optimization
- 9.458 appsDelivery and pickup
- 10.455 appsInventory sync
Top 10 categories by July launches
Apps that first appeared on the Shopify App Store during July 2026.
- 1.145 newAnalytics
- 2.116 newSEO
- 3.85 newLegal
- 4.82 newChat
- 5.81 newInventory optimization
- 6.75 newDiscounts
- 7.56 newUpsell and cross-sell
- 8.46 newShipping
- 9.44 newProduct content
- 10.43 newInvoices and receipts
Analytics and SEO dominate new-app supply again (145 and 116 July launches respectively), both already have hundreds of established competitors. The surprise third is Legal with 85 launches, a category that barely registered a year ago, as compliance tooling becomes its own niche.
Most-installed categories (by reviews)
Product reviews has the most concentrated demand on Shopify: 87,406 reviews across just 205 reviewed apps, 426 reviews per app, roughly twice the ratio of any other top category.
Review counts are an imperfect proxy for installs, but the proxy is consistent across categories. Where a small number of apps share a large pool of reviews, demand is concentrated, and the established players are hard to dislodge.
| Category | Total reviews | Apps | Reviews per app |
|---|---|---|---|
| SEO | 87,947 | 396 | 222 |
| Product reviews | 87,406 | 205 | 426 |
| Upsell and cross-sell | 79,921 | 564 | 142 |
| Email marketing | 61,151 | 176 | 347 |
| Marketplaces | 56,685 | 140 | 405 |
| Product bundles | 52,544 | 229 | 229 |
| Loyalty and rewards | 48,049 | 208 | 231 |
| Discounts | 46,713 | 473 | 99 |
| Pop-ups | 45,923 | 259 | 177 |
| Ads | 38,425 | 208 | 185 |
Apps counted are live apps in the category with at least one review; apps can belong to multiple categories.
Top developers by portfolio
UnReact Inc. publishes 157 live apps, the largest portfolio on the store, but those 157 apps share only 22 reviews between them, the classic signature of an app farm.
App-count leaderboards reward both real platform builders (Shopify, Webkul, Elfsight) and portfolio publishers shipping many low-engagement apps. Read this table with the reviews and average rating columns in hand.
| Developer | Apps | Total reviews | Avg rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| UnReact Inc. | 157 | 22 | 4.86 ★ |
| Kaktus | 66 | 1,314 | 4.86 ★ |
| GoodApps | 65 | 1,040 | 4.70 ★ |
| Webkul Software Pvt Ltd | 51 | 668 | 4.52 ★ |
| Elfsight | 43 | 194 | 4.63 ★ |
| Auremist | 42 | 25 | 4.90 ★ |
| Addify | 41 | 122 | 4.30 ★ |
| Shopify | 40 | 38,938 | 3.85 ★ |
| Expound Coderz Pvt Ltd | 37 | 20 | 4.67 ★ |
| Mega Profit Apps | 35 | 27 | 4.77 ★ |
Top 10 apps by reviews
Judge.me leads the Shopify App Store with 42,693 reviews, nearly 3× the next-most-reviewed third-party app, and 5 of the top 10 carry the Built for Shopify badge.
| App | Developer | Rating | Reviews | Category | BFS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Judge.me Product Reviews App | Judge.me | 5 | 42,693 | Product reviews | check |
| TikTok | TikTok Inc. | 4.8 | 15,247 | Ads | – |
| Shopify Flow | Shopify | 4.7 | 11,533 | Workflow automation | – |
| Loox ‑ Product Reviews App | Loox | 4.9 | 8,816 | Product reviews | check |
| Pop Convert ‑ Pop Ups, Banners | Pop Convert | 4.9 | 8,568 | Pop-ups | check |
| Shop | Shopify | 4.8 | 8,209 | Marketplaces | – |
| Appstle℠ Subscriptions App | Appstle Inc. | 5 | 8,034 | Subscriptions | check |
| SendWILL Popup Email Marketing | SendWILL | 4.9 | 7,467 | Pop-ups | check |
| DSers: Dropship+AliExpress+AI | DSers | 5 | 5,864 | Dropshipping | – |
| PageFly Landing Page Builder | PageFly | 4.9 | 5,656 | Page builder | – |
One change from June: DSers(dropshipping, with "AI" now in its listing name) enters the top 10, displacing Shopify Inbox.
Listing maturity: new vs established
July launches arrive with 4.8 screenshots on average vs 5.0 across the installed base, and only 20.6% include a video vs 28.4% for live apps overall.
| Cohort | Apps | Avg screenshots | With video | Avg plans | Avg languages |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| July launches | 2,318 | 4.8 | 477 (20.6%) | 2.2 | 2 |
| All live apps | 25,780 | 5 | 7,320 (28.4%) | 2.1 | 2.2 |
July launches are nearly as well-equipped on screenshots and pricing tiers as established apps, but lag on video adoption and localization. Adding both is among the cheapest moves a new launch can make to close the gap.
The localization gap
75.6% of live Shopify apps ship in English only, leaving the rest of the world's merchants underserved and the rest of the catalogue's developers an open opportunity.
Language coverage across the live catalogue
Shopify itself operates in dozens of locales; the App Store doesn't reflect that. For an app already earning English-language reviews, translating to even one additional widely-spoken language is one of the clearest unforced wins on the store.
How this report was built
All numbers come from AppstorePulse's daily monitoring of every public Shopify App Store listing, which records pricing, tagline, description, screenshots, badges, categories, languages, and reviews. This report uses the snapshot dated 31 July 2026.
Live apps are de-duplicated public listings present in the most recent successful data refresh. July launches are apps whose first observed publication date falls in July 2026. Reviews posted is the sum of per-app increases in listed review counts across the month, from the daily index, computed identically for June and July. Reviews purged is the corresponding sum of per-app decreases on live apps. Per-review details (posted dates, star ratings of new reviews) come from a weekly per-review index.
What revises and what doesn't: app, launch, category, badge, and posted/purged review counts come from the daily index, are point-in-time, and don't revise. The per-review stats (apps reviewed, average rating of new reviews) keep accruing for a few weeks as later reviews are indexed.
AI mentions are token matches on "AI" and related forms in name, tagline, and description. That's a measure of how apps market themselves, not of what they technically do. An app that wraps a Claude API call without saying so isn't counted; an app that puts "AI" in the name without doing anything AI-shaped is.
Reviews per app is computed as total category reviews divided by the number of reviewed apps in the category, rounded; apps can belong to multiple categories. Built for Shopify share rounds to one decimal place. All percentages are rounded honestly; tiny differences between bar chart segments and percentage labels reflect that rounding.
Errata or methodology questions: mat@appstorepulse.com.
About AppstorePulse
If you ship apps on the Shopify App Store, you're operating blind. Shopify doesn't tell you where you rank for any keyword. They don't tell you when a competitor changes their price, screenshots, or badge. There's no public install-attribution API. AppstorePulse fixes that.
We monitor every public Shopify app every day, currently 25,780 of them, plus 1,007,145 reviews indexed since 2013. The product turns that data into six things you can do that you can't do anywhere else:
- Track where you rank for every keyword that matters, with full daily history, trend lines, and drop alerts.
- Get notified within 24 hours when a competitor changes their price, screenshots, badges, tagline, or categories.
- Join your Google Analytics with Shopify Partners' server-side install data, so click-vs-install attribution is real, not guessed.
- Compare your listing against the category leader on a 100-point health audit anyone can run free, no signup.
- Discover under-served keyword niches before they saturate, using search volume × top-app rating intersection.
- See what's launching, growing, and disappearing across the entire App Store, the same data that built this report.
This report is built from the same daily index Pro customers see live in their dashboards.
Cite this report
“AppstorePulse, State of the Shopify App Store, July 2026 report. Published 1 August 2026.”
https://appstorepulse.com/reports/state-of-shopify-app-store-july-2026Frequently asked questions
How many Shopify apps are there?expand_more
As of 31 July 2026 there are 25,780 live public apps on the Shopify App Store, with 1,003,196 reviews across them and an average rating of 4.67 stars on apps with five or more reviews.
How many new Shopify apps launched in July 2026?expand_more
2,318 apps launched on the Shopify App Store in July 2026, up 15.8% from June's 2,001 and the busiest launch month since May. 1,528 of those launches (around 66%) include a free plan and 790 (around 34%) are paid-only. 62 apps were removed from the App Store during the same month.
What percentage of Shopify apps mention AI?expand_more
20.3% of live Shopify apps mention AI somewhere in their name, tagline, or description (5,224 of 25,780), up from 19.8% a month earlier. Among apps that launched in July 2026, the share is 25.4% (588 of 2,318), roughly 1.25× the installed base. The gap between new launches and the installed base is narrowing as the base itself fills with AI apps.
How many reviews were posted on the Shopify App Store in July 2026?expand_more
Merchants posted 30,832 new reviews in July 2026, up 15.1% from June's 26,797, measured as the sum of every app's increase in listed review count from AppstorePulse's daily index. Over the same month Shopify removed roughly 30,500 reviews from live listings, so net listed review counts barely moved.
Did Shopify delete reviews in July 2026?expand_more
Listed review counts on live apps dropped by roughly 30,500 in aggregate during July 2026, nearly 10 times June's removal volume, with single-day step-downs on major apps in mid-July. That pattern is most consistent with a large-scale Shopify review moderation sweep. It removed almost exactly as many reviews as merchants posted, leaving net listed counts nearly flat for the month.
What's the average rating of a Shopify app?expand_more
Across all live Shopify apps with five or more reviews, the average rating is 4.67 stars. New reviews indexed for July 2026 averaged 4.83 stars, slightly above the all-time average.
Which category has the most apps?expand_more
Analytics is the largest category by app count, with 1,230 live apps. It was also the most-launched category in July 2026 with 145 new entries. The next largest categories by app count are SEO (870), Chat (856), Discounts (806), and Shipping (793).
How is this data collected?expand_more
AppstorePulse maintains a daily index of every public Shopify App Store listing, recording pricing, descriptions, screenshots, badges, categories, languages, and reviews. This report uses the snapshot dated 31 July 2026. Monthly posted-review figures come from the daily change in each app's listed review count; individual review records (dates, star ratings) are indexed by a weekly sweep.