App Store sees a new surge in launches, and Appfigures ties it to AI tools

The App Store is growing again: the number of new apps rose sharply in 2026, and analytics platform Appfigures has recorded a launch rate comparable to the peak years of the smartphone boom. The leading hypothesis is that AI development tools have radically lowered the barrier to entry for anyone who wanted to build a mobile product but could not afford to before.

Appfigures, one of the key platforms for monitoring the App Store and Google Play, tracks metrics daily across hundreds of thousands of apps. According to its latest data, the number of new apps appearing in the stores shot up in the first months of 2026. The trend covers both Apple's iOS ecosystem and the Android segment.

The main explanation is AI. Over the past year, tools such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor and similar AI coding assistants have gone mainstream. They let experienced engineers speed up development several times over, and let people without deep technical training build full-fledged apps from scratch. Where a team of three to five people once needed several months, a single developer now manages in a couple of weeks.

It is not the only factor. No-code and low-code platforms have also multiplied, and they increasingly use AI to generate logic, interfaces and marketing materials automatically. The barrier to entry has dropped so far that entrepreneurs and small teams who previously could not afford to hire developers now build apps themselves. The shift is especially visible in niches that previously lacked specialized tools: local services, utilities for specific professions and narrow B2B solutions.

Historically, the App Store has gone through several waves of growth. The first came in the early iPhone years, when developers rushed to claim the new platform. The second was the rise of social networks and media. The third, in 2013-2015, was the gaming boom. In recent years growth slowed: the stores are saturated, competition for attention is fierce, and development costs remained high. Based on Appfigures data, a fourth wave is starting, this one under the banner of AI.

What does this mean for the market? Competition in the App Store will intensify further: if building apps has become cheaper and faster, the number of products fighting for users will also grow. Those who solve a real problem and deliver quality UX will be able to survive; cloning other people's ideas with AI is no longer enough. Apple will earn more in commissions. For independent developers and small studios, a new window of opportunity is opening.

The boom in AI development tools is the democratization of software creation in action. If the trend is confirmed, we are at the start of a new cycle in which the key competitive advantage will be not the ability to write code, but the ability to pick the right problem to solve.