The average smartphone owner uses 9 apps a day and 30 apps a month, according to comScore’s 2017 U.S. Mobile App Report, still the most recent large-scale study to measure this exact figure. Almost nine years later, with the Apple App Store alone carrying 2.49 million apps as of July 2026, that per-person number has barely been re-measured even as the catalog it is drawn from has exploded. More choice, roughly the same daily habit: that gap is the real story behind how many apps people use.
If you build or maintain an app, the practical question is not how many apps exist, it is how many of the 9 to 30 slots in a typical person’s routine your app can realistically compete for. The data below covers what is known, what has gone stale, and where the honest answer is “nobody has measured this recently.”
How many apps does the average person use each day and each month?
The most cited figure for this exact question comes from comScore’s 2017 U.S. Mobile App Report, later summarized by TechCrunch: the average American smartphone owner used 9 apps per day and 30 apps per month. comScore did not publish the exact panel size for this specific breakdown, drawing instead on its ongoing Mobile Metrix measurement panel of U.S. smartphone owners, so treat the precision of “9” and “30” as directional rather than exact to the decimal.
The same report measured where mobile time goes: apps captured 89% of total mobile media time, with the mobile browser taking the remaining 11%. That split is one reason app usage, not mobile web usage, became the metric every platform and publisher started optimizing for after 2017.
Figure 1: Where mobile time goes. Source: comScore, U.S. Mobile App Report, 2017.
Nine apps a day sounds low next to a catalog measured in the millions, but it lines up with how attention works: a handful of habitual apps absorb almost all of a person’s mobile time, and everything else is either occasional or unused.
Why hasn’t anyone re-measured this since 2017?
This is the honest gap in the data, and it is worth naming directly rather than papering over with a newer-sounding but unrelated number. Major mobile analytics firms shifted their flagship annual reporting away from “apps used per person” and toward aggregate metrics, total time spent on device, total downloads, total consumer spend, sometime around 2018, and neither comScore nor Sensor Tower’s State of Mobile series has since republished a directly comparable per-person apps-used figure at the same national scale.
Warning
Treat any blog roundup that cites a specific, non-comScore “average apps used per month” figure for 2024, 2025, or 2026 with caution. We traced several widely repeated numbers back through their citation chain and found them either restating the 2017 comScore figure without attribution or citing a source that does not contain a per-person usage count. Where a number in this article is not independently re-measured since 2017, we say so.
What has been measured continuously in that window is the size of the catalog people are choosing from, and total download volume. Both climbed steadily while the per-person habit, as far as anyone has published, stayed roughly flat.
Figure 2: App catalog growth against the one point where per-person usage was last measured. Sources: comScore (2017), 42matters live tracker (July 2026), Statista App Store history.
If per-person app usage really has stayed close to flat since 2017, that means the ratio of apps available to apps used has gotten dramatically more lopsided, not because people use fewer apps, but because the catalog grew and the daily habit did not.
How many apps get abandoned after a single use?
A quarter of downloaded apps, 25%, get opened exactly once and never again, according to Localytics’ long-running app engagement research. Drop-off accelerates fast after that first open: an analysis of Android usage data by Quettra, popularized by former Uber growth lead Andrew Chen, found the average app loses 77% of its daily active users within the first 3 days after install, 90% by day 30, and 95% by day 90.
That retention curve explains a lot about why total apps installed and apps used diverge so sharply for most people. A person can download a dozen apps in a week for a one-time task, a flight boarding pass, a conference badge, a store loyalty scan, and never open most of them again.
Figure 3: How fast the average app loses its early users. Source: Quettra Android usage data, popularized by Andrew Chen.
Both figures are dated (2016 to 2017), and neither has a well-documented modern replacement at comparable sample size, which is consistent with the broader measurement gap covered above. The direction they describe, steep early drop-off, a small set of apps retaining daily attention, still matches what more recent download and spend data implies even without a fresh per-app retention study to confirm the exact numbers.
How many apps are available to choose from in 2026?
The Apple App Store carried 2,488,542 apps as of July 25, 2026, according to 42matters’ live tracker, while Google Play carried between 1.91 million (AppBrain) and 2.47 million (42matters) depending on which crawler’s counting rules you use. Both totals sit far above where either store stood in 2017, when comScore’s per-person usage figure was last measured.
| Metric | 2017 (approx.) | 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Apple App Store catalog size | ~2.2 million apps | 2,488,542 apps |
| Average apps used per day (person) | 9 apps | Not re-measured since 2017 |
| Average apps used per month (person) | 30 apps | Not re-measured since 2017 |
| Global annual app downloads | Tens of billions | 149 billion (2025) |
Sources: comScore (2017); 42matters live tracker (July 2026); Sensor Tower, State of Mobile 2026.
For a full breakdown of what that catalog produces in downloads and revenue, see our App Store downloads and revenue statistics roundup. If your app is one of the roughly 560,000 added to the App Store in just the first half of 2026, standing out inside someone’s fixed 9-app daily routine starts with the basics working, including licensing terms that match what your app does. You can generate a EULA in a few minutes rather than adapting boilerplate written for a different kind of app.
A catalog measured in the millions and a daily habit measured in single digits are not in tension, they are the same story from two different angles.
Is total app usage growing or shrinking heading into 2026?
At the aggregate level, usage is still growing, just slowly. Apps were downloaded 149 billion times globally in 2025, up only 0.8% from 2024, according to Sensor Tower’s State of Mobile 2026 report, while consumer spend inside apps rose a faster 10% to $167 billion. Growth has shifted from more downloads to more valuable downloads, which is consistent with a population that already uses roughly the same number of apps it used in 2017 but now pays more for the ones it keeps.
Figure 4: Download volume climbing slower each year even as the catalog grows much faster. Source: Sensor Tower, State of Mobile 2026 report.
Download growth this flat, under 1% in the most recent year, is easier to explain once the per-person usage figure is back in view. If the average person still opens roughly 9 apps a day, extra downloads mostly replace apps that get abandoned rather than adding new daily habits on top. The next question is what happens to a download once it lands on a device: whether it survives long enough to become one of those 9 daily apps, or joins the quarter that never gets opened twice.
Figure 5: How a download becomes one of a person’s daily-used apps, or does not. Source: synthesized from Quettra/Andrew Chen retention data and comScore’s per-person usage figures.
Aggregate download and spend totals keep climbing even though the evidence available says individual usage has plateaued, which points to population growth and rising spend per user, not a rising number of apps used per person, as the real driver of app-economy growth.
The Bottom Line
The most defensible answer to “how many apps does the average person use” is still comScore’s 2017 finding: 9 apps a day, 30 a month, and nobody has re-measured it at comparable scale since. What has changed since then is the size of the catalog competing for those same 9 daily slots, from roughly 2.2 million App Store apps in 2017 to 2,488,542 by July 2026, plus a download total that reached 149 billion in 2025. For a developer, the practical implication is not “make an app,” it is “earn one of a fixed number of daily slots,” since a quarter of new downloads never get opened a second time and 77% of the rest fall off within three days. A licensing agreement and onboarding experience that hold up under that kind of scrutiny matter more than they did when the catalog was a tenth of its current size.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many apps does the average person use per day? 9 apps a day, according to comScore’s 2017 U.S. Mobile App Report, which remains the most recent large-scale study to measure this exact figure. The same report put monthly usage at 30 apps.
How many apps does the average person use per month? 30 apps a month, per comScore’s 2017 report. That number has not been re-measured at comparable scale since, even as the Apple App Store catalog has grown from about 2.1 million apps in 2017 to 2,488,542 by July 2026.
What share of downloaded apps get used only once? 25% of apps downloaded are opened once and never again, according to Localytics’ long-running app engagement research. A separate analysis found the average app loses 77% of its daily active users within 3 days of install.
How many apps are available to choose from in 2026? The Apple App Store carried 2,488,542 apps as of July 25, 2026, per 42matters, while Google Play carried between 1.91 million and 2.47 million depending on the tracker. Global downloads reached 149 billion in 2025, per Sensor Tower’s State of Mobile 2026 report.
Sources and References
- comScore. (2017). “The 2017 U.S. Mobile App Report.” Mobile Metrix panel data, U.S. smartphone owners.
- TechCrunch. (2017). “Report: Smartphone Owners Are Using 9 Apps Per Day, 30 Per Month.” Summary of comScore’s 2017 findings.
- 42matters. (2026). Live App Store and Google Play tracking dashboard. Snapshot dated July 25, 2026.
- Sensor Tower. (2026). “State of Mobile 2026.” Global download and consumer spend data, published January 21, 2026.
- Localytics. App engagement and retention research. Single-use abandonment figure.
- Andrew Chen. Analysis of Quettra Android retention data. Day 1/3/30/90 retention curve.
Note: All figures verified as of July 2026. The per-person apps-used figure is a 2017 measurement with no confirmed comparable re-measurement since; catalog size and download totals are refreshed at least twice a year as newer tracker data becomes available.
