App Store and Google Play submissions have more than doubled as releasing an app gets easier and discovery gets uglier

The number of apps and games being submitted to the two major mobile stores has more than doubled since early 2025, according to figures surfaced in today's mobile-industry data digest. Google Play submissions rose from 46,136 in March 2025 to 111,047 in July 2026, while Apple's App Store moved from 46,889 to 117,648 over the same period. Those numbers do not mean every submission represents a completely new, high-quality game, but they illustrate how dramatically the supply side of mobile development has expanded.

Better engines, reusable frameworks, asset marketplaces and increasingly capable AI-assisted development tools have made it possible for smaller teams and individual creators to ship software at a speed that would have looked absurd several years ago. The less cheerful consequence is discovery. More than 100,000 monthly submissions create a storefront where merely existing professionally is no longer remotely enough to attract attention.

Developers now need marketing, community, store optimisation, creative testing and retention work before their lovingly built icon becomes anything more than one colourful square in a hurricane of colourful squares. For mobile publishers, today's numbers are simultaneously encouraging and terrifying: building has become more accessible, while getting anyone to notice what you built has become considerably harder.