Apple reveals exactly how many apps were in the App Store at the end of 2022

If you're old enough, you might remember when Apple introduced the App Store back on July 10th, 2008 which coincided with the release of the iPhone 3G. The opening of the App Store changed everything and all of a sudden, the iPhone became exponentially more useful. The App Store launched with 500 apps available. By the time Apple was advertising the iPhone 3GS in 2009, the ads were claiming that there were 75,000 apps in the App Store. That doubled to 150,000 apps by February 2010.

And the number kept growing. By 2011, just 34 months since the App Store opened for business, it had over 500,000 apps on the shelves. In 2012, the App Store had 700,000 apps. But by July 2013, the Google Play Store, which started life in 2008 as the Android Market on the T-Mobile G1 (with less than 50 apps) had passed the App Store. The Play Store was the first to hit the one million app mark topping the 900,000 that was then available from the iOS app storefront. Five months later, the App Store finally went over the 1 million app mark.

Apple today released its 2022 App Store Transparency Report that indicated exactly how many apps were available in the App Store by the end of last year. That figure amounted to 1,783,232 apps which is more than 3566 times the number of apps in the App Store when it first launched 14 years before. According to Apple, it removed 186,195 apps from the App Store last year.

Apple notes that "Apps may be removed from the App Store for a number of reasons, including violations of local law, repeated violations of App Store policy, fraud, and demands by regulators." Games (38,883 apps removed) and Utilities (20,045) were the two categories with the most removed apps in the App Store last year.

Apple removed 1,474 apps from the App Store due to government demand. As the company stated, "Apps are removed only from storefronts in which the entity demanding removal has jurisdiction, and they remain available in all other storefronts." Perhaps it is not a huge surprise that 97% of the apps removed from the App Store because of a country's request came from mainland China.

Even though developers make much more money from the App Store than the Google Play Store, the latter hosts nearly more than 1 million more apps than the App Store. The Android app storefront had 2,694,114 apps available at the end of last year according to Statista. Part of the theory that many have come up with to explain this discrepancy is that since those with an iPhone pay more for their phone, they have the wherewithal to purchase more apps than Android users.

With the release of its 2022 App Store Transparency Report, its first-ever, Apple writes, "Our App Store Transparency Report provides data about how we operate the App Store in all 175 countries and regions where it’s available. Below you’ll find information about our efforts to help keep the App Store a safe and trusted place for users to find apps they love. This report covers data from 2022, and we’ll update the information annually."

Apple didn't create the report out of the kindness of its heart. The report was part of a settlement related to a $100 million class action lawsuit between Apple and app developers in 2021. Besides having to shell out some money to developers (half received a $250 check while only 1% were supposed to be sent a $30,000 payment from Apple), the settlement requires Apple to release this App Transparency Report every year starting with the one just posted by Apple covering 2022.

The plaintiffs alleged that Apple would not allow app developers to communicate with its customers. Apple did not want these developers to provide links to third-party payment platforms that would allow subscribers to make in-app purchases using a third-party payment platform. This would allow subscribers to bypass Apple's own in-app payment platform which collects a 30% cut of the price of an in-app purchase from an app's developer.

The report shows that the average number of customers searching the App Store each week during 2022 was an impressive 373,211,396. The total number of apps appearing in the top ten results of at least 1,000 searches was 1,399,741. At the end of 2022, the number of registered Apple developers was 36,974,015.

The average number of weekly visitors to the App Store was 656,739,889 and the average number of app downloads each week was 747,873,877.