“Zombie” apps becoming more common in the App Store

Apps that have little to no chance of becoming popular on the App Store are becoming more common. These so-called “zombie” applications have grown over the past year. A new report from Adjust.com has found that zombie apps now make up 83% of the entire App Store, compared to just 74% early last year.

During the period of time between January and December 2014, the App Store as a whole grew in size by 60%. The App Store reached 1.42 million apps by the end of the year but started 2014 with just 890,000 apps. During the same period of time, a large percentage of those apps became hard to find and were guaranteed to never have any sort of success.

As the App Store has grown, new and existing developers have found it more difficult to launch popular apps. “Living” apps are becoming less common now that so many developers are publishing apps that are either not good or have never been seen by enough people.


Some of the issues for developers are also tied to a bad search function in the App Store. Finding apps in the store is difficult, and the search function rarely makes it easy to find less popular software. Of course, it’s not easy to create a good search function when there are nearly 1.5 million apps to scan through.