As of July 28, 2026, 1,063,724 developer accounts are actively publishing apps on the Apple App Store, according to app-intelligence firm 42matters’ live catalog tracker. That is the most current, verifiable answer to how many iOS developers exist, though it undercounts anyone registered with Apple who has never shipped a live app. Apple’s own lifetime registration count runs far higher, and neither number alone tells the full story of who builds for iOS.
How many iOS developers are actively publishing apps right now?
The most current count comes from third-party crawlers that track the live App Store directly rather than from Apple itself. 42matters, an app-intelligence firm that refreshes its trackers daily, counted 1,063,724 active publisher accounts on the Apple App Store, measured July 28, 2026. Between them, those publishers maintain 2,499,903 live apps, an average of 2.35 apps per active account, and add roughly 3,788 new listings per day.
That combined figure is the closest thing to a live iOS developer count that exists, because Apple does not publish a running total of App Store publishers on its own. It also has a clear limit: an account with several employees publishing under one company listing still counts once, so the true number of individual people writing iOS code is higher than 1,063,724, not lower.
Figure 1: Active iOS publishers measured against Apple’s own lifetime registration count. Source: 42matters (Jul 28, 2026), Apple 2024 App Store Transparency Report.
That gap, 1.06 million against 51.77 million, is the whole reason “how many iOS developers are there” does not have one clean answer. Most of what these publishers ship costs nothing to download, 94.95% of the App Store’s catalog is free, a split covered in full in our free-versus-paid app breakdown.
Is there an official worldwide iOS developer count?
No single organization publishes one. Apple discloses a lifetime registered-developer figure that spans every platform it supports, not iOS specifically, and it comes from an annual transparency report rather than a live dashboard. Third-party crawlers fill the gap by counting live App Store listings instead, which updates faster but excludes anyone registered who has not shipped an app.
Both approaches are defensible, and neither is complete. Apple’s registration figure counts people who joined the Apple Developer Program, whether or not they ever published anything; some share of that 51.77 million never intended to ship an app on the store at all, since the same program membership covers macOS, watchOS, and Safari extension development too. The live-tracker figure captures who is shipping today, but folds multiple employees at the same company into a single publisher account.
Figure 2: Why “how many iOS developers are there” resolves to more than one correct answer, depending on the definition used. Source: Apple 2024 App Store Transparency Report, 42matters.
Read the two figures side by side rather than picking one: 51.77 million is who has ever joined Apple’s developer program, and 1.06 million is who is shipping on the App Store this week.
How many people are registered in Apple’s Developer Program?
Apple’s own registered-developer count comes from its annual App Store Transparency Report, not a live tracker. The 2024 edition put the worldwide total at 51,766,243 registered developers, up 22.61% from 42,219,169 in 2023 and 36,974,015 in the first report Apple published, covering 2022. That growth rate outpaced the App Store’s own catalog, which grew just 4.89% over the same year to 1,961,596 listed apps by the close of 2024.
Registration and enforcement move together in the same report. Apple terminated 146,747 developer accounts in 2024, 146,583 of them for fraud, and rejected 139,000 developer enrollment applications before they reached the program. Only 225 of 8,132 developer appeals succeeded in getting a terminated account reinstated. A EULA that matches what an app collects and how it licenses that data is one of the more common things review flags; you can generate a EULA that reflects your app’s real functionality rather than adapting a template written for a different one.
How widely is Swift used among developers?
Not as widely as the App Store’s headline numbers might suggest. Swift, Apple’s primary language for iOS, macOS, and visionOS development, was used by just 5.4% of the 31,771 developers who answered the programming-language question in the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey. That is a broad, cross-platform panel rather than an iOS-specific one, so the share is a floor on iOS-focused usage, not a ceiling.
Inside the narrower group of developers who do build for iOS, adoption of Apple’s current tooling looks far more uniform. A June 2026 survey of 404 iOS developers by cloud-Mac provider RentAMac found that 94% were already building current submissions on Xcode 26 and the iOS 26 SDK, which became mandatory for all new App Store submissions on April 28, 2026. That sample skews toward RentAMac’s own paying customers, solo indie developers, students, agency teams, and enterprise engineers, so treat it as directional for the wider publisher population rather than a random sample of all 1.06 million.
Figure 3: Share of surveyed iOS developers building on Apple’s mandatory current toolchain. Source: RentAMac iOS App Development Survey, June 2026 (n=404).
Within that same survey, 61% kept Apple’s new Liquid Glass interface as the default appearance rather than opting out, and 38% had already moved to Swift 6 language mode, which treats strict-concurrency issues as build errors instead of warnings. Tooling adoption is running well ahead of language-level migration.
How does the iOS developer population compare to the broader developer world?
Zoomed out past app stores, the numbers get larger and less iOS-specific. Evans Data Corporation counted 27 million professional developers worldwide in 2024, a figure cited across the software industry as a broad professional baseline. SlashData’s developer-population research put the worldwide total at 47.2 million as of the first quarter of 2025, a figure SlashData says grew 50% over the prior three years.
Figure 4: Four dated developer-population disclosures, each measuring a different group. Sources: Evans Data Corporation, Apple, SlashData, 42matters.
None of these four figures measure the same population, and none is wrong. Evans Data counts professional software developers across every specialty. SlashData counts anyone who writes code as part of their work or personal projects, professional or not. Apple counts everyone who has ever registered for its developer program, most of whom never ship an app. Only 42matters’ 1.06 million measures people publishing live iOS apps right now, which puts active iOS publishers at somewhere between 2.3% (against SlashData) and 3.9% (against Evans Data) of the wider developer population, depending on which baseline is used. For the download and revenue side of the same app economy these developers are building for, see our App Store 2026 breakdown.
Where are iOS developers located, and what do they earn?
Company-level technology tracking gives the clearest available picture of where Swift adoption concentrates, though it counts organizations using Swift rather than individual developers. 6sense’s technology-adoption data found 12,840 companies using Swift worldwide, with the United States accounting for 52.25% of them (4,720 companies), India for 11.53% (1,042), and the United Kingdom for 7.99% (722). Treat that as a proxy for where iOS engineering teams are based, not a headcount of individual developers.
Figure 5: Where Swift-using companies concentrate, by country. Source: 6sense technology-adoption tracking.
In the United States specifically, iOS developer pay clusters in a fairly narrow band across several major salary trackers. Indeed reported an average of $137,346 per year as of mid-2026, while Glassdoor and ZipRecruiter both landed closer to $124,000 to $134,000 over the same period. None of these trackers publish a disclosed sample size or methodology, so treat any single figure as directional; the consistent range across all three, roughly $120,000 to $140,000, is more reliable than any one number alone.
iOS developer counts, side by side
| Source | What it measures | Count | Measured |
|---|---|---|---|
| 42matters | Active App Store publisher accounts | 1,063,724 | Jul 28, 2026 |
| Apple (2024 Transparency Report) | Registered developers, all Apple platforms | 51,766,243 | 2024 |
| SlashData | Worldwide developer population | 47.2 million | Q1 2025 |
| Evans Data Corporation | Professional software developers worldwide | 27 million | 2024 |
Every number in that table is real and sourced, and every one would mislead if presented alone as “the” iOS developer count. The table below narrows the lens to what active publishers ship today.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Active publisher accounts | 1,063,724 |
| Live apps on the store | 2,499,903 |
| Average apps per publisher | 2.35 |
| New apps published per day | 3,788 |
Source: 42matters live tracker, measured July 28, 2026.
The Bottom Line
There is no single official count of iOS developers, and any source that gives you one round number without naming its methodology is smoothing over a real disagreement. The most current, narrowly defined figure is 1,063,724 active App Store publisher accounts, measured July 28, 2026. The most widely repeated figure is Apple’s own 51,766,243 registered developers, which grew 22.61% in a single year but measures a lifetime registration count across every Apple platform, not iOS publishing specifically. Zoomed out further, SlashData’s 47.2 million and Evans Data’s 27 million describe the entire worldwide developer population, of which active iOS publishers make up a low single-digit share. If you are one of the 1,063,724 shipping on the App Store today, the number that matters most is not any of these three: whether your app’s licensing terms and data disclosures still match what the app does, since Apple rejected 1,931,400 submissions and terminated 146,747 developer accounts in 2024 alone.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many iOS developers are there in 2026? 1,063,724 developer accounts are actively publishing apps on the Apple App Store, according to 42matters’ live catalog tracker measured July 28, 2026. That figure covers every account with at least one live app, not registered developers who have never shipped one.
How many people are registered in Apple’s Developer Program? Apple counted 51,766,243 registered developers worldwide in its 2024 App Store Transparency Report, up 22.61% from 42,219,169 in 2023. That count spans every Apple platform a developer has ever registered for, not iOS or App Store publishing specifically.
What percentage of developers worldwide use Swift? 5.4% of the 31,771 developers who answered the programming-language question in the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey reported using Swift. That is a broad cross-platform sample, not an iOS-only panel, so the true share among app-focused developers is likely higher.
How many software developers are there worldwide, and where do iOS developers fit? SlashData counted 47.2 million developers worldwide in the first quarter of 2025, and Evans Data Corporation separately counted 27 million professional developers in 2024. Against either total, the 1,063,724 active iOS App Store publishers make up roughly 2% to 4% of the global developer population.
Sources and References
- 42matters. “iOS Apple App Store Statistics and Trends.” Live tracker, data captured July 28, 2026.
- Apple. “2024 App Store Transparency Report.” Published May 30, 2025, covering calendar year 2024.
- Apple. “2023 App Store Transparency Report.” Published May 16, 2024, covering calendar year 2023.
- SlashData. “Global Developer Population Trends 2025.” State of the Developer Nation research, Q1 2025 estimate.
- Evans Data Corporation. (2024). “Worldwide Developer Population Grows to 27 Million.” Press release, published July 29, 2024.
- Stack Overflow. “2025 Developer Survey: Technology.” Programming-language question, n=31,771.
- RentAMac. “iOS App Development Statistics: 2026 Survey & Data.” Survey of 404 iOS developers, June 2026.
- 6sense. “Swift: Market Share, Competitor Insights in Languages.” Technology-adoption tracking.
Note: All figures verified as of July 2026. Live App Store publisher and catalog counts are third-party-tracked figures that change daily rather than official published statistics, and Apple’s own registration figures refresh only once a year via its App Store Transparency Report, so the headline numbers in this article are revisited at least twice a year.
