How many apps are on the App Store and Google Play, and how many get rejected?

Apple: the App Store Transparency Report

Apple publishes the report on its legal pages, for all 175 countries and regions where the App Store is available. The page that lists the editions has four, 2022 to 2025, each with a data file, and says Apple will update the information annually. The 2025 edition is a web page and the 2024 edition a PDF that says it covers data from 2024. The 2025 page prints neither its period nor a date of publication. Apple's server gives 22 May 2026 as the day its data file last changed, and Apple's newsroom post of 20 May 2026 gives the same counts, rounded, as figures for 2025.

• A submission is not an app. One app sent three times is three submissions, and the report does not say how many of the 9,100,620 were new apps and how many were updates. So 23.0% is a share of submissions, not of apps or of founders. Apple prints the two counts and no percentage, and does not say how many rejected apps never came back.
• The sections overlap. They are the five sections of the App Review Guidelines, plus Other. In the 2025 edition they add up to 2,704,747, more than the rejections, because one submission can be rejected under several guidelines. Performance, the largest, holds guideline 2.1, App Completeness.
• Removal is not always a penalty. The list of provisions cited for the 2025 removals is led by fraud under the developer agreement, 90,608, and guideline 4.0, Design, 72,271. A footnote calls the second an ongoing cleanup of outdated apps.
• Accounts. Of the 193,035 developer accounts terminated, 192,702 are listed under fraud. Developers appealed 10,127 terminations and 499 accounts were restored. The report does not say what makes a developer registered.

Apple's own statement on fraud, 20 May 2026

Apple's newsroom post of 20 May 2026 is a company statement, not a data table, and it rounds. Its title figure, over $2.2 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions stopped in 2025, is $2,232,110,720 in the report. It adds three things the report leaves out.

• New apps and updates. Of more than 2 million submissions rejected, over 1.2 million were new apps and nearly 800,000 were app updates.
• Reasons, in round numbers. Over 443,000 submissions were rejected for privacy violations, over 371,000 for copying other apps, spam or misleading users, and over 22,000 for hidden or undocumented features.
• Developers. Apple rejected more than 138,000 developer enrolments, and says App Review helped welcome over 306,000 new developers.

Google Play: Google's yearly safety post

Google's figures for Google Play come in a post it publishes each year. The post for 2025 is dated 19 February 2026, the post for 2024 29 January 2025 and the post for 2023 29 April 2024.

• The first figure. Apps that broke Google Play policy and were stopped before publication. No post counts the apps submitted or reviewed, so there is nothing to divide by, and none says whether an app stopped twice is counted twice.
• The second. For 2025 and 2024, developer accounts banned after trying to publish harmful apps. The 2023 post words it differently: accounts banned for violations such as confirmed malware and repeated severe policy violations. No post gives a total of developer accounts.
• The fall from 2024. The 2025 post does not mention the year before. It reads its own figures as protections putting bad actors off, and credits developer verification, mandatory checks before review and testing requirements. That is Google's reading, not a measured cause.

None of the three posts gives a count of the apps on Google Play. The UK edition of How Google Play works says it provides 2 million apps and games, in a sentence footnoted as of June 2021. The US edition of the same page says only millions.

Why the two stores cannot be compared line for line

Each cell comes from the sources above, chiefly Apple's 2025 report and Google's post for 2025. So 2,093,244 and 1.75 million are not two readings of the same thing. Apple's count takes in every rejection under any guideline. Google's takes in only apps stopped for breaking policy, with nothing to divide it by. Neither figure says which store is stricter.

What the figures do not show

• How many products never got listed. Apple counts submissions, Google counts blocked apps, and neither says how many rejected products were given up.
• Whether a listed product is found. Apple's 2025 report says that in an average week 164,436 apps appeared in the top 10 results of at least 1,000 searches, beside 2,172,472 apps on the store. It does not explain the measure further, and Google's posts have nothing like it.
• Review times, fees and sales. None is in the report or the posts. App Store and Google Play has the review times and fees each store publishes.
• Estimates from outside. No analytics firm's estimate of app counts is used here, because it is not the store reporting on itself.

What to do about it

A rejection is ordinary: on Apple's count, 23 in every 100 submissions got one in 2025, and 387,087 were approved after one. And a listing is not distribution.

• Read the rules before you submit. App Store and Google Play has the guidelines behind these rejections, the listing limits, the fees and the review times.
• Put review time in your launch plan. On Google Play, a new personal account must run a closed test first.
• Pick the channel that brings people to the listing. Distribution channels takes each from its own rules, among them SEO, ChatGPT and AI search, Reddit, Product Hunt and directories.
• Then work out the listing's conversion rate: how many of those who see it install.
• How do I market my app? gives the order to do it in, and Building with AI, in numbers shows how much is being built.