Store pulse
Launches, delistings, and review velocity across every live listing — the week's movement in four numbers and two paragraphs.
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Where complaints are rising and which niches are opening. The trends, judged on years of data.
22,675 apps69848,717 reviews996
Launches, delistings, and review velocity across every live listing — the week's movement in four numbers and two paragraphs.
One category with open water: app count, leader ratings, how long the top listing has sat unchallenged — plus what merchants hate, clustered from every new 1–3★ review in the niche.
The number I keep coming back to is 4.3 percent. That is how many of last week’s reviews were one, two or three stars, and it barely moves: between 3.6 and 4.2 percent every month this year. It is the store’s resting pulse. When a category runs well above it, something is actually wrong there.
One more thing I do not see anyone else counting: 5 apps were properly delisted last week, but 146 quietly went non-public. Still working if you have the link, just no longer findable. Twenty nine apps disappear that way for every one that dies outright.
In early July something changed in Shopify Inbox. Shopify never announced it, and I cannot find it anywhere in their changelog. But merchants describe it consistently, in several languages, starting on 7 July: shoppers pushed through Shop account sign in and verification, and merchants left looking at anonymous “Shop Visitors” instead of a name and an email.
“We went from 5-10 inquiries daily to 0 for a full week.”
Inbox went from about 9 bad reviews a month to 44 in July, and the whole chat category felt it. Complaints went from 5.6 percent of reviews in June to 11.4 percent in July, against a store rate of around 4. Doubled in a month.
Merchants in chat already pay: apps that charge hold 67 percent of the category’s reviews, median entry around $20 a month. A category where the crowd uses free tools has already told you what it is willing to pay. And none of the five biggest chat apps has touched its listing in the last fortnight. Nobody is racing you.
Once you set Inbox aside, the complaints about the paid chat apps are almost all about how they sell to you.
“Says there is a free trial. But charged me the full price.”
“The app pushes upgrade requests almost immediately.”
Four different paid apps. Not missing features. Conduct. 33 apps launched into chat in the last 30 days, so you would not be first, but you would be competing on something most of them are getting wrong.
HOW I COUNT · WEEK OF 10 TO 16 AUGUST 2026, ACROSS ALL 22,205 LIVE APPS. STAR RATINGS ARE A CENSUS, NOT A SAMPLE: EVERY REVIEW ON THE STORE, 841,858 OF THEM, EACH WITH ITS OWN POSTING DATE. DELISTED MEANS THE LISTING RETURNS A 404; NON-PUBLIC MEANS GONE FROM CATEGORY BROWSE WHILE THE PAGE STILL ANSWERS.
Free · monthly · 22,675 apps and 848,717 reviews tracked daily