Inside Google Play in 2026: What 3M+ Listings Reveal

Every published number about Google Play seems to come from somewhere else, and they rarely agree. This page is the one place we keep ours. Testers Community has built and maintained its Google Play listing database since 2024. This report analyzes 3,037,501 distinct listings across its current study corpus. Each finding links to its underlying study and defined base.

How many apps are on Google Play?

We observed 3,037,501 distinct listings from 27 July to 25 August 2026. Google publishes no official app total or complete public directory. Because the observation spans a month, our figure is a research corpus, not the number of apps live on one day.

Published estimates run from about 1.58 million to 3.5 million and use different dates and methods. Cleanup waves change availability, every counter reaches a different set of apps, and "an app" is defined differently by each. The full account of why the counts disagree, and how to cite any of them honestly, is in how many apps are on Google Play.

How many apps launch each day?

About 2,100 a day in 2026. Of the listings in our data that show a release date, 499,548 were first released in 2026, and our data runs to 25 August. That pace passed the whole of 2025, which produced 399,738, with four months of the year still to go.

A separate discovery batch contained 250,952 app IDs previously unseen by our database. Of those, 179,614 produced listing records; collection failed for 71,338. Discovery is not a launch count, and collection failure is not evidence of removal. See the discovery-batch analysis for the method and results.

How many are games?

312,795 listings sit in a game category, 10.3% of our study. Games behave differently from everything else: they are far more likely to pass a million installs, far more likely to carry ads, and more than twice as common in the collected discovery batch as in the full study corpus: 21.1% versus 10.3%.

Free, paid, ads and in-app purchases

97.4% of listings are free to install. The 2.56% that charge an upfront price typically ask $1.99, and nine in ten of them stay under $9.99. Money comes in through the free apps instead: 27.3% declare ads and 11.4% offer in-app purchases.

How many apps show a rating?

12.2%. Google Play displays a star score only once an app has gathered enough ratings, and 878 of every 1,000 listings have not. Among apps first released in 2026, 96.4% show no rating at all. Where a score is shown, the average is 4.04, which says more about who leaves ratings than about the apps.

The share rises steeply with reach: 0.1% of apps under 100 installs show a rating, and 93.6% of apps past a million do. A silent listing is the normal state of a new app, not a fault in it.

How many installs does a typical app get?

Between 100 and 499 lifetime installs. That is the middle of the store. 36.4% of listings have never passed 100 installs and 62.7% have never passed 1,000. At the other end, 2.2% have passed one million, roughly one app in 45.

Averages mislead here, because a few thousand giant apps pull them up by orders of magnitude. The typical app is the honest figure, and it is small.

How many apps are abandoned?

28.3% of listings have not shipped an update in over a year, and 8.1% have been silent for more than three. Just over half, 53.5%, were updated within the last six months. These shares are computed over the 3,036,563 listings that show an update date.

Abandonment is not evenly spread. Apps with more installs update more often, and the oldest launch classes carry the largest share of silent listings. The shelf a new app joins is therefore thinner than the raw count suggests, and more cluttered.

Who publishes Google Play apps?

1,034,014 distinct publisher IDs appear across the listings in our study. Most observed accounts hold one app, while 3.3% hold at least ten and account for 42.8% of the study's listings. The largest observed account holds 10,985 apps.

The numbers in one table

Every headline figure on this page, with the base it is computed over and the study it comes from. Studies not yet linked are being published over the coming weeks.

How this page is updated

Last updated 16 September 2026. Testers Community has maintained the database since 2024 and updates new listing activity every week. The current store-wide figures use records observed between 27 July and 25 August 2026. The newest week always appears on the weekly page. When a number here is revised, the date above changes with it, so a citation with the date attached stays correct.

About this data

Every figure on this page comes from the Google Play listing database Testers Community has built and maintained since 2024. This 2026 study analyzes 3,037,501 listings observed from 27 July to 25 August 2026. Every store-wide figure on this page is computed over all of them unless a smaller base is stated in the table. Install counts, prices, ratings, release dates and update dates are the ones shown on each listing. What counts as an app, what is excluded and how percentages are based is set out in how we count Google Play apps.

How to read these findings

• Not a census. These are the listings we could reach. Google publishes no total, so every figure is a share of the 3M+ listings in our data, never a share of the whole Play Store.
• One window. The store-wide figures describe the store as it stood in late summer 2026. Apps delisted before then are missing, which flatters the older launch years.
• Correlation only. Fuller listings sit with higher installs, and games carry more ads. Which causes which is not established here.
• No ranking or search data. Google Play exposes neither, so nothing here says what ranks, only what exists.
• No revenue. Prices, ads and in-app purchase flags are declarations on the listing, not earnings.

Frequently asked questions

Citing this research

The Google Play listing database behind this paper has been built and maintained by Testers Community since 2024. Testers Community, Inside Google Play in 2026: What 3M+ Listings Reveal, September 2026. Based on 3,037,501 Google Play listings in the current study, observed from 27 July to 25 August 2026. When you quote a figure, keep the base and the date range with it, and use "at least" with the count, because a store this fluid has no single true total.