Seven things to take away
If you only read one block, read this one. Every bullet starts with a number.
- 2,230 apps launched in September 2026, up 20% from August. The summer slowdown is over.
- 0.95× is the AI ratio now: 19.3% of September launches mention AI vs 20.3% of live apps. For the first time, new launches mention AI less than the apps already on the store.
- 24,999 reviews were posted in September by our per-review index, 4.8% fewer than August. Both months are fully indexed.
- 52,826 reviews came back on listings between 1 and 3 September: Shopify restored reviews removed in earlier purges. 367 of the 550 apps that gained 20 or more had lost reviews in July.
- 82 Legal apps launched, tying SEO for second place. Compliance tooling keeps growing month after month.
- 1,749 apps carry the Built for Shopify badge, 6.1% of the store, the same share as August as badges keep pace with launches.
- 74.8% of live apps are English-only. Localization is still the cheapest gap to close.
The App Store at the end of September
The Shopify App Store ended September with 28,717 live public apps, up 1,910 in a month, carrying 1,058,036 reviews at an average rating of 4.67 stars.
Free vs paid split
66% of live apps offer at least one free plan and 34% are paid-only. The ratio has held steady for months: the App Store is a freemium marketplace.
Built for Shopify adoption
1,749 apps (6.1%) carry the Built for Shopify badge, Shopify's mark of technical and UX quality. The other 94% don't, which keeps the badge a real way to stand out.
September in numbers
2,230 apps launched (+20%) and 320 left the store in September 2026. Merchants posted 24,999 new reviews, close to August's pace.
New reviews posted, August vs September
Counted from our per-review index, which records every review with its date. A month on, both August and September are fully indexed, so the comparison is like for like: 24,999 in September vs 26,259 in August, 4.8% fewer.
Who's getting reviewed
3,158 distinct apps received at least one review in September, about 1 in 9 live apps. New reviews averaged 4.86 stars, above the store-wide 4.67.
New launches mention AI less than the store
19.3% of September launches mention AI vs 20.3% of live apps, a ratio of 0.95×. It was 1.33× in June, 1.25× in July and 1.04× in August.
Share of apps mentioning AI
The label that set new apps apart in the spring is now standard across the catalogue. One in five live apps mentions AI, and new launches no longer lead on it. For a new app, saying "AI" on the listing is now expected, so what the app does for the merchant has to carry the pitch.
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 1,398 live apps, and the most-launched again in September with 121 new apps.
Top 10 categories by total live apps
End of September 2026.
- 1.1,398 appsAnalytics
- 2.986 appsSEO
- 3.930 appsChat
- 4.918 appsShipping
- 5.896 appsDiscounts
- 6.693 appsUpsell and cross-sell
- 7.597 appsInventory optimization
- 8.531 appsDropshipping
- 9.506 appsDelivery and pickup
- 10.480 appsInventory sync
Top 10 categories by September launches
Apps that first appeared on the Shopify App Store in September 2026.
- 1.121 newAnalytics
- 2.82 newSEO
- 3.82 newLegal
- 4.74 newDiscounts
- 5.73 newInventory optimization
- 6.68 newChat
- 7.54 newUpsell and cross-sell
- 8.50 newShipping
- 9.44 newInvoices and receipts
- 10.42 newProduct variants
Analytics and SEO lead new supply for the fifth month running. The climber is Legal: 82 launches, level with SEO, up from 52 in August. With 477 live apps it now sits just outside the top 10. Discounts (74) and Inventory optimization (73) round out the top five.
Most-installed categories (by reviews)
Product reviews and Marketplaces have the most concentrated demand, about 431 reviews per reviewed app each. SEO has the largest total pool, 98,188 reviews.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| SEO | 98,188 | 468 | 210 |
| Product reviews | 96,085 | 223 | 431 |
| Upsell and cross-sell | 89,432 | 641 | 140 |
| Email marketing | 64,956 | 184 | 353 |
| Marketplaces | 63,326 | 147 | 431 |
| Product bundles | 62,154 | 256 | 243 |
| Discounts | 53,554 | 528 | 101 |
| Loyalty and rewards | 51,775 | 228 | 227 |
| Pop-ups | 44,390 | 275 | 161 |
| Product variants | 43,733 | 298 | 147 |
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. publishes 190 live apps, 25 more than at the end of August and the largest portfolio on the store, 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. | 190 | 21 | 4.85 ★ |
| GoodApps | 67 | 1,139 | 4.75 ★ |
| Kaktus | 66 | 1,440 | 4.89 ★ |
| Webkul Software Pvt Ltd | 52 | 712 | 4.58 ★ |
| Friends2a Technology | 52 | 14 | 4.88 ★ |
| Elfsight | 43 | 207 | 4.61 ★ |
| Addify | 43 | 130 | 4.25 ★ |
| Auremist | 41 | 32 | 4.90 ★ |
| Shopify | 40 | 45,086 | 3.91 ★ |
| Expound Coderz Pvt Ltd | 37 | 26 | 4.73 ★ |
Top 10 apps by reviews
Judge.me leads with 47,733 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 | 47,733 | Product reviews | check |
| TikTok | TikTok Inc. | 4.8 | 15,969 | Ads | – |
| Shopify Flow | Shopify | 4.7 | 14,357 | Workflow automation | – |
| Loox ‑ Product Reviews App | Loox | 4.9 | 9,715 | Product reviews | check |
| Shop | Shopify | 4.8 | 9,409 | Marketplaces | – |
| Appstle℠ Subscriptions App | Appstle Inc. | 5 | 8,856 | Subscriptions | check |
| Pop Convert ‑ Pop Ups, Banners | Pop Convert | 4.9 | 8,740 | Pop-ups | check |
| CW Email Popup Email Marketing | CWILL INC | 4.9 | 7,719 | Pop-ups | check |
| DSers: Dropship+AliExpress+AI | DSers | 5 | 6,302 | Dropshipping | – |
| Kaching Bundles App & Upsells | Kaching Bundles & Upsells | 5 | 6,092 | Product bundles | check |
Kaching Bundles enters the top 10 at 6,092 reviews, and Appstle moves up to sixth, ahead of Pop Convert.
Listing maturity: new vs established
September launches arrive with 5.0 screenshots on average vs 5.1 across the store, but only 19.7% include a video vs 27.8% of live apps.
| Cohort | Apps | Avg screenshots | With video | Avg plans | Avg languages |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| September launches | 2,230 | 5 | 439 (19.7%) | 2.2 | 2.2 |
| All live apps | 28,717 | 5.1 | 7,983 (27.8%) | 2.2 | 2.3 |
New apps match the store on screenshots, pricing tiers and languages. Video is the gap: adding one is among the cheapest ways for a new listing to look as complete as the established apps around it.
The localization gap
74.8% of live Shopify apps ship in English only, which leaves most of the world's merchants underserved and an open opportunity for the developers who translate.
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 September 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 a backlog of apps that had left the store in earlier months; dating each one by its last live day keeps them out of September's live count. On this basis August ended with 26,807 live apps (published at the time as 27,700), and September grew by 1,910. September launches are apps first published in September 2026.
Reviews posted come from our per-review index, which records every review with its posted date; a month on, September is fully indexed. Since July we had used the daily change in listed review counts instead. That measure includes the one-off step of 1 to 3 September described above, so this month we use the per-review index and compare it with August on the same basis. Reviews removed by moderation is the sum of per-app decreases in listed review counts over the month.
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 28,717 of them, plus 1,069,258 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, September 2026 report. Published 2 November 2026.”
https://www.appstorepulse.com/reports/state-of-shopify-app-store-september-2026Frequently asked questions
How many Shopify apps are there?expand_more
At the end of September 2026 there were 28,717 live public apps on the Shopify App Store, with 1,058,036 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 September 2026?expand_more
2,230 apps launched on the Shopify App Store in September 2026, up 20% from August's 1,854. 1,434 of them (64%) include a free plan and 796 (36%) are paid-only. 320 apps left the App Store during the month.
What percentage of Shopify apps mention AI?expand_more
20.3% of live Shopify apps mention AI in their name, tagline or description (5,840 of 28,717). Among apps launched in September 2026 the share is 19.3% (431 of 2,230), or 0.95 times the installed base. For the first time since we started tracking it, new launches mention AI less often than the apps already on the store.
How many reviews were posted on the Shopify App Store in September 2026?expand_more
Our per-review index counts 24,999 reviews posted in September 2026, 4.8% fewer than August's 26,259 by the same method. Both months are now fully indexed.
Why did Shopify app review counts jump in early September 2026?expand_more
Shopify put back reviews it had removed in earlier purges. Between 1 and 3 September 2026, the review counts shown on app listings rose by 52,826, with 550 apps gaining 20 or more in two days. 367 of those 550 apps had lost reviews in July's purge (12,905 between them) and got 18,992 back. These are restored reviews, not new ones, so they are kept out of September's new-review total.
What's the average rating of a Shopify app?expand_more
Across live Shopify apps with five or more reviews, the average rating is 4.67 stars. Reviews posted in September 2026 averaged 4.86 stars.
Which category has the most apps?expand_more
Analytics is the largest category, with 1,398 live apps, and it was again the most-launched category in September 2026 with 121 new apps. SEO (986), Chat (930), Shipping (918) and Discounts (896) follow.
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 September 2026. Individual reviews are indexed by a weekly sweep.