If you only read one block, read this one. Every bullet starts with a number.
- 2,713 apps launched on the Shopify App Store in May 2026, and 23.8% of them mention AI in their name, tagline, or description, vs 14.7% of the installed base.
- 21,509 live public apps now serve Shopify merchants, carrying 828,076 reviews at an average rating of 4.65 stars.
- 21,254 new reviews were posted in May, +4.0% over April, the only honest month-over-month signal in this report, since review timestamps come straight from Shopify.
- 1,497 apps now carry the Built for Shopify badge, about 7% of the live catalogue. Only one of the top 10 most-reviewed apps does not have it.
- 76.6% of live apps are English-only. Localization remains the largest, cheapest, most-ignored optimization on the App Store.
appstorepulse.com/reports · State of the Shopify App Store, May 2026
The Shopify App Store now hosts 21,509 live public apps with 828,076 reviews across them at an average rating of 4.65 stars.
Average rating (5+ reviews)
Built for Shopify apps (7%)
Free vs paid split
65% of live apps offer at least one free plan; 35% are paid-only. The Shopify App Store is structurally a freemium marketplace.
Free plan available · 14,071
Paid-only · 7,438
Total reviews ever
We have collected 950,996 reviews going back to 2013. Of those, 828,076 (87%) sit on apps that are still live, a useful reminder that the App Store has a meaningful long-tail of delisted history.
On live apps · 828,076
On removed apps · 122,920
appstorepulse.com/reports · State of the Shopify App Store, May 2026
2,713 apps launched and 56 apps were removed in May 2026, while merchants posted 21,254 new reviews, up 4.0% over April.
Apps removed from the store
Review velocity, April vs May
Review timestamps come from Shopify's posted_at field and are stable month-over-month. New-review volume grew from 20,439 in April to 21,254 in May (+4.0%).
Who's getting reviewed
2,243 distinct apps received at least one review in May, roughly 1 in 10 live apps. The new reviews themselves skewed positive: an average of 4.81 stars, slightly above the all-time mean of 4.65.
Apps reviewed in May
10% of live
Avg rating of new reviews
vs 4.65 all-time
infoWhy no month-over-month launch comparison? Data coverage was still expanding through April 2026, so an apples-to-apples MoM for launches would be misleading. Review timestamps are comparable because they come from Shopify directly. We'll publish honest launch MoM starting next month.
appstorepulse.com/reports · State of the Shopify App Store, May 2026
AI mentions are 1.6× over-represented in May launches: 23.8% of new apps mention AI, vs 14.7% of the installed base.
of May launches mention AI (647 of 2,713)
of all live apps mention AI (3,163 of 21,509)
Share of apps mentioning AI
May 2026 launches23.8%647 of 2,713
All live apps14.7%3,163 of 21,509
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.
appstorepulse.com/reports · State of the Shopify App Store, May 2026
Analytics is the single largest category on the Shopify App Store, with 982 live apps, and it was also the most-launched category in May, with 188 new entries.
Top 10 categories by total live apps
Snapshot as of 31 May 2026.
- 1.982 apps
- 2.703 apps
- 3.694 apps
- 4.671 apps
- 5.649 apps
- 6.516 apps
- 7.505 apps
- 8.425 apps
- 9.394 apps
- 10.393 apps
Top 10 categories by May launches
Apps that first appeared on the Shopify App Store during May 2026.
- 1.188 new
- 2.139 new
- 3.112 new
- 4.75 new
- 5.66 new
- 6.61 new
- 7.61 new
- 8.51 new
- 9.50 new
- 10.49 new
SEO and Analytics dominate new-app supply(139 and 188 launches respectively in May). Both categories already have hundreds of established competitors, meaning May's launchers face the steepest discovery competition on the store.
appstorepulse.com/reports · State of the Shopify App Store, May 2026
Product reviews is the largest category by review volume on Shopify, 77,625 reviews across just 347 apps, making it the highest per-app installed demand in the catalogue.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Product reviews | 77,625 | 347 | 224 |
| SEO | 32,983 | 649 | 51 |
| Product variants | 32,590 | 330 | 99 |
| Marketplaces | 30,043 | 181 | 166 |
| Email marketing | 28,903 | 279 | 104 |
| Ads | 27,945 | 287 | 97 |
| Dropshipping | 27,615 | 505 | 55 |
| Pop-ups | 27,293 | 257 | 106 |
| Product bundles | 26,155 | 253 | 103 |
| Loyalty and rewards | 25,468 | 276 | 92 |
appstorepulse.com/reports · State of the Shopify App Store, May 2026
UnReact Inc. publishes 151 live apps, the largest portfolio on the store, but those 151 apps share only 20 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. | 151 | 20 | 4.84 ★ |
| Kaktus | 65 | 1,258 | 4.85 ★ |
| GoodApps | 63 | 1,033 | 4.68 ★ |
| Webkul Software Pvt Ltd | 51 | 693 | 4.45 ★ |
| Elfsight | 43 | 207 | 4.58 ★ |
| Auremist | 42 | 19 | 5.00 ★ |
| Shopify | 40 | 35,798 | 3.93 ★ |
| Addify | 40 | 122 | 4.15 ★ |
| Expound Coderz Pvt Ltd | 36 | 21 | 4.60 ★ |
| Mega Profit Apps | 35 | 66 | 4.81 ★ |
appstorepulse.com/reports · State of the Shopify App Store, May 2026
Judge.me leads the Shopify App Store with 39,809 reviews, nearly 3× the next-most-reviewed third-party app and 7 of the top 10 carry the Built for Shopify badge.
| App | Developer | Rating | Reviews | Category | BFS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Judge.me Product Reviews App | Judge.me | 5 | 39,809 | Product reviews | check |
| TikTok | TikTok Inc. | 4.8 | 13,145 | Ads | – |
| Shopify Flow | Shopify | 4.7 | 10,546 | Workflow automation | – |
| Pop Convert – Pop Ups, Banners | Pop Convert | 4.9 | 8,397 | Pop-ups | check |
| Loox – Product Reviews App | Loox | 4.9 | 7,990 | Product reviews | check |
| Appstle℠ Subscriptions App | Appstle Inc. | 5 | 7,197 | Subscriptions | check |
| SendWILL Popup Email Marketing | SendWILL | 4.9 | 7,115 | Pop-ups | check |
| Shop | Shopify | 4.8 | 6,975 | Marketplaces | – |
| PageFly Landing Page Builder | PageFly | 4.9 | 5,689 | Page builder | check |
| Shopify Inbox | Shopify | 4.7 | 5,374 | Chat | – |
appstorepulse.com/reports · State of the Shopify App Store, May 2026
May launches arrive with 4.7 screenshots on average vs 5.0 across the installed base, and only 23.7% include a video vs 29.5% for live apps overall.
| Cohort | Apps | Avg screenshots | With video | Avg plans | Avg languages |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| May launches | 2,713 | 4.7 | 644 (23.7%) | 2.2 | 2 |
| All live apps | 21,509 | 5 | 6,348 (29.5%) | 2.1 | 2.3 |
May 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.
appstorepulse.com/reports · State of the Shopify App Store, May 2026
76.6% 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
English-only76.6%16,470 apps
2–5 languages9.3%1,999 apps
5+ languages7.2%1,550 apps
Language data unknown6.9%1,490 apps
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.
appstorepulse.com/reports · State of the Shopify App Store, May 2026
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 May 2026.
Live apps are de-duplicated public listings present in the most recent successful data refresh. May launches are apps whose first observed publication date falls in May 2026. Reviews are counted by Shopify's posted_at field, which is stable across months and lets us compare review velocity honestly.
What we can't honestly compare yet: month-over-month launch counts. Data coverage was still expanding through April 2026, so an April-vs-May launch comparison would be biased by coverage growth, not real-world growth. We're skipping launch MoM in this first report and will publish it cleanly from June onward.
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 category app count, rounded. 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.
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 21,509 of them, plus 950,996 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, May 2026 report. Published 1 June 2026.”
https://appstorepulse.com/reports/state-of-shopify-app-store-may-2026
How many Shopify apps are there?expand_more
As of 31 May 2026 there are 21,509 live public apps on the Shopify App Store, with 828,076 reviews across them and an average rating of 4.65 stars on apps with five or more reviews.
How many new Shopify apps launched in May 2026?expand_more
2,713 apps launched on the Shopify App Store in May 2026. 1,754 of those launches (around 65%) include a free plan and 959 (around 35%) are paid-only. 56 apps were removed from the App Store during the same month.
What percentage of Shopify apps mention AI?expand_more
14.7% of live Shopify apps mention AI somewhere in their name, tagline, or description (3,163 of 21,509). Among apps that launched in May 2026, the share is 23.8% (647 of 2,713), roughly 1.6× higher than the installed base, suggesting the share of AI-marketed apps is climbing fast.
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 4.65 stars. New reviews posted in May 2026 averaged 4.81 stars, slightly above the all-time average.
Which category has the most apps?expand_more
Analytics is the largest category by app count, with 982 live apps. It was also the most-launched category in May 2026 with 188 new entries. The next largest categories by app count are Chat (703), Shipping (694), Discounts (671), and SEO (649).
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 May 2026. Review counts and timestamps come from Shopify's posted_at field, which is comparable month-over-month.