Seven things to take away
If you only read one block, read this one. Every bullet starts with a number.
- 3,102 apps launched in October 2026, up 39% from September and the busiest month since May.
- 387 apps went in Shopify's late-October cleanup, 92% of them with no reviews, from 101 developers. The largest portfolio, UnReact Inc., lost 52.
- 26 established apps with 100+ reviews also left the store in October, against 5 in September, among them Privy, Brevo PushOwl and Swym Wishlist Plus.
- 0.88× is the AI ratio: 17.9% of October launches mention AI vs 20.4% of live apps. New launches lean on AI less for a second month.
- 115 Legal apps launched, second only to Analytics, and Legal enters the top 10 categories by live apps for the first time.
- 21,674 new reviews were posted in October, and Product reviews takes back the largest review pool from SEO, after two big SEO apps left.
- 74.0% of live apps are English-only, down from 74.8% in September.
The App Store at the end of October
The Shopify App Store ended October with 31,075 live public apps, up 2,358 in a month, carrying 1,034,046 reviews at an average rating of 4.68 stars.
Free vs paid split
67% of live apps offer at least one free plan and 33% are paid-only. The App Store remains a freemium marketplace.
Built for Shopify adoption
1,881 apps (6.1%) carry the Built for Shopify badge, 132 more than in September. The share holds at 6.1% as badges keep pace with a big wave of launches.
October in numbers
3,102 apps launched (+39%) and 744 left the store in October 2026, most of them in Shopify's late-October cleanup. Merchants posted 21,674 new reviews.
New reviews posted by month
Measured from the daily index: the sum of every app's increase in listed review count over the month. October's 21,674 is the lowest since we started measuring this way in June, partly because the 26 established apps that left took their review growth with them.
September is left out: Shopify restored 52,826 previously removed reviews on 1 to 3 September, so its daily-index figure isn't comparable. Our per-review index counts 24,999 reviews posted in September (see the September report).
Where the reviews went
Reviews on live apps fell by 23,990 in October. The apps that left during the month took 37,704 indexed reviews with them, more than new reviews added back. New reviews indexed so far averaged 4.87 stars.
Established apps that left
26 apps with 100 or more reviews left the store in October, carrying 34,287 reviews between them. September saw 5 such apps, August 1.
| App | Reviews | Category |
|---|---|---|
| BOOSTER AI SEO + AEO OPTIMIZER | 5,478 | SEO |
| Privy ‑ Email, SMS & Pop Ups | 4,205 | Email marketing |
| Color Swatch King: Variants | 3,238 | Product variants |
| SEOLab: All in #1 SEO & AI AEO | 2,851 | SEO |
| Brevo PushOwl: Email,Push,SMS | 2,311 | Email marketing |
| Track123 Order Tracking | 1,756 | Order tracking |
| Boost AI Search & Filter | 1,636 | Search and filters |
| Swym Wishlist Plus | 1,481 | Wishlists |
The eight largest by reviews. Each listing showed "This app is not currently available on the Shopify App Store" when we checked on 1 November 2026. For merchants using them, and for competitors in SEO, email, variants, order tracking, search and wishlists, these are real openings: thousands of stores now need a replacement.
AI is now the norm, not the pitch
17.9% of October launches mention AI vs 20.4% of live apps, a ratio of 0.88×, down from 0.95× in September and 1.33× in June.
Share of apps mentioning AI
The installed base keeps edging up (20.3% to 20.4%) while new launches mention AI less. Developers are leading with what their app does for the merchant, and AI has become part of the toolkit rather than the headline.
Methodology note: this counts the token "AI" in an app's name, tagline or description. It measures how apps market themselves, not what they do under the hood.
Categories: where the apps are
Analytics is the largest category with 1,520 live apps and the most-launched in October with 159. Legal is second for launches with 115.
Top 10 categories by total live apps
End of October 2026.
- 1.1,520 appsAnalytics
- 2.1,062 appsSEO
- 3.998 appsChat
- 4.980 appsDiscounts
- 5.975 appsShipping
- 6.756 appsUpsell and cross-sell
- 7.664 appsInventory optimization
- 8.579 appsLegal
- 9.546 appsDropshipping
- 10.541 appsDelivery and pickup
Top 10 categories by October launches
Apps that first appeared on the Shopify App Store in October 2026.
- 1.159 newAnalytics
- 2.115 newLegal
- 3.104 newDiscounts
- 4.103 newSEO
- 5.89 newChat
- 6.85 newInventory optimization
- 7.84 newUpsell and cross-sell
- 8.63 newBulk editor
- 9.63 newShipping
- 10.59 newWholesale
Legal keeps climbing: 52 launches in August, 82 in September and 115 in October. With 579 live apps it enters the top 10 categories for the first time, in eighth place. Discounts (104) edges past SEO (103) for launches, and Bulk editor and Wholesale join the launch top 10.
Most-installed categories (by reviews)
Product reviews is back on top with 97,777 reviews across 227 apps, 431 per app. SEO drops to 91,889 after BOOSTER AI SEO and SEOLab left the store.
Review counts are an imperfect proxy for installs, but a consistent one across categories. Where a few apps share a large pool of reviews, demand is concentrated and the leaders are hard to dislodge.
| Category | Total reviews | Apps | Reviews per app |
|---|---|---|---|
| Product reviews | 97,777 | 227 | 431 |
| SEO | 91,889 | 477 | 193 |
| Upsell and cross-sell | 89,316 | 659 | 136 |
| Marketplaces | 64,697 | 151 | 428 |
| Product bundles | 63,880 | 278 | 230 |
| Email marketing | 61,315 | 194 | 316 |
| Discounts | 53,379 | 553 | 97 |
| Loyalty and rewards | 46,667 | 226 | 206 |
| Pop-ups | 44,888 | 291 | 154 |
| Ads | 41,737 | 222 | 188 |
Apps counted are live apps in the category with at least one review; apps can belong to several categories.
Top developers by portfolio
UnReact Inc. still publishes the most apps, 146, down from 190 after the cleanup, with 21 reviews across all of them.
App-count leaderboards reward both real platform builders (Shopify, Webkul, Elfsight) and 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. | 146 | 21 | 4.84 ★ |
| Kaktus | 67 | 1,455 | 4.90 ★ |
| GoodApps | 67 | 1,151 | 4.76 ★ |
| Webkul Software Pvt Ltd | 52 | 716 | 4.58 ★ |
| Addify | 44 | 133 | 4.24 ★ |
| Elfsight | 43 | 205 | 4.58 ★ |
| Auremist | 42 | 41 | 4.90 ★ |
| Shopify | 40 | 46,968 | 3.96 ★ |
| Expound Coderz Pvt Ltd | 38 | 27 | 4.77 ★ |
| Mega Profit Apps | 35 | 36 | 4.82 ★ |
Top 10 apps by reviews
Judge.me leads with 49,387 reviews, three times the next third-party app, and 6 of the top 10 carry the Built for Shopify badge.
| App | Developer | Rating | Reviews | Category | BFS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Judge.me Product Reviews App | Judge.me | 5 | 49,387 | Product reviews | check |
| TikTok | TikTok Inc. | 4.8 | 16,034 | Ads | – |
| Shopify Flow | Shopify | 4.7 | 15,188 | Workflow automation | – |
| Shop | Shopify | 4.8 | 9,999 | Marketplaces | – |
| Loox ‑ Product Reviews App | Loox | 4.9 | 9,998 | Product reviews | check |
| Appstle℠ Subscriptions App | Appstle Inc. | 5 | 9,153 | Subscriptions | check |
| Pop Convert ‑ Pop Ups, Banners | Pop Convert | 4.9 | 8,686 | Pop-ups | check |
| CWILL Popup Email Marketing | CWILL INC | 4.9 | 7,677 | Pop-ups | check |
| Kaching Bundles App & Upsells | Kaching Bundles & Upsells | 5 | 6,553 | Product bundles | check |
| DSers: Dropship+AliExpress+AI | DSers | 5 | 6,427 | Dropshipping | – |
Shop moves up to fourth, one review ahead of Loox, and Kaching Bundles passes DSers for ninth.
Listing maturity: new vs established
October launches arrive with 5.1 screenshots on average, the same as the store, and 21.1% include a video vs 28.3% of live apps.
| Cohort | Apps | Avg screenshots | With video | Avg plans | Avg languages |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| October launches | 3,102 | 5.1 | 653 (21.1%) | 2.3 | 2.1 |
| All live apps | 31,075 | 5.1 | 8,782 (28.3%) | 2.2 | 2.4 |
New apps now match the store on screenshots and ship slightly more pricing tiers (2.3 vs 2.2). Video adoption among new launches rose to 21.1% from 19.7% in September, but it is still the clearest gap.
The localization gap
74.0% of live Shopify apps ship in English only, down from 74.8% in September. Apps in two or more languages grew to 6,188.
Language coverage across the live catalogue
Shopify itself runs in dozens of locales; the App Store doesn't reflect that. For an app already earning English-language reviews, translating into even one more widely spoken language is one of the clearest wins on the store.
How this report was built
All numbers come from AppstorePulse's daily index of every public Shopify App Store listing, which records pricing, tagline, description, screenshots, badges, categories, languages and reviews. Month-end figures use each app's last daily record in the final week of October 2026.
Live apps are public listings present at the end of the month. Apps that left the store are dated to the day after we last saw them live. In mid-October our index flagged 1,710 apps as removed during the month, 982 of which had left in earlier months; dating each one by its last live day counts them in the month they actually left. The late-October cleanup counts apps seen live after 25 October and removed between 28 and 31 October. Established apps are apps with 100 or more reviews; we checked each listing on the Shopify App Store on 1 November 2026, and one that was live again is not counted.
Reviews posted is the sum of per-app increases in listed review counts between the end of September and the end of October, from the daily index. Reviews removed by moderation is the corresponding sum of decreases. Per-review details (apps reviewed, average rating of new reviews) come from a weekly per-review index and keep accruing for a few weeks.
AI mentions are matches on the token "AI" in name, tagline and description: a measure of how apps market themselves, not of what they do. Reviews per app is category reviews divided by reviewed apps in the category; apps can belong to several categories. Percentages are rounded.
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, or when a competitor changes their price, screenshots or badge. There's no public install-attribution API. AppstorePulse fixes that.
We follow every public Shopify app every day, currently 31,075 of them, plus 1,083,208 reviews indexed since 2013. The product turns that data into six things 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-to-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 and top-app ratings together.
- 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, October 2026 report. Published 2 November 2026.”
https://www.appstorepulse.com/reports/state-of-shopify-app-store-october-2026Frequently asked questions
How many Shopify apps are there?expand_more
At the end of October 2026 there were 31,075 live public apps on the Shopify App Store, with 1,034,046 reviews across them and an average rating of 4.68 stars on apps with five or more reviews.
How many new Shopify apps launched in October 2026?expand_more
3,102 apps launched on the Shopify App Store in October 2026, up 39% from September's 2,230 and the busiest month since May. 2,094 of them (67.5%) include a free plan and 1,008 (32.5%) are paid-only.
Did Shopify remove apps from the App Store in October 2026?expand_more
Yes. Between 28 and 31 October 2026, 387 apps that we had seen live a few days earlier were removed, 92% of them with no reviews, from 101 developers. In all, 744 apps left the store during October, against 320 in September.
Which well-known Shopify apps left the App Store in October 2026?expand_more
26 apps with 100 or more reviews left in October, carrying 34,287 reviews between them, against 5 such apps in September. They include BOOSTER AI SEO + AEO OPTIMIZER, Privy, Color Swatch King, SEOLab, Brevo PushOwl, Track123, Boost AI Search & Filter and Swym Wishlist Plus. Each listing showed "not currently available" when we checked on 1 November 2026.
What percentage of Shopify apps mention AI?expand_more
20.4% of live Shopify apps mention AI in their name, tagline or description (6,349 of 31,075). Among apps launched in October 2026 the share is 17.9% (556 of 3,102), 0.88 times the installed base, the second month in a row that new launches mention AI less than the store.
How many reviews were posted on the Shopify App Store in October 2026?expand_more
Merchants posted 21,674 new reviews in October 2026, measured as the sum of every app's increase in listed review count between the end of September and the end of October. About 2,800 were removed by moderation.
Which category has the most apps?expand_more
Analytics is the largest category with 1,520 live apps, and the most-launched in October 2026 with 159 new apps. Legal was second for launches with 115 and entered the top 10 categories by live apps for the first time.
How is this data collected?expand_more
AppstorePulse keeps a daily index of every public Shopify App Store listing, recording pricing, descriptions, screenshots, badges, categories, languages and reviews. This report uses each app's last daily record in the final week of October 2026. Individual reviews are indexed by a weekly sweep.