60% of the Apps on Your Phone Are Already Dead

A few days ago I opened the App Store's update page and saw an app pushing a new version. The screenshots were polished and the changelog was written with care. I stared at the icon for two seconds before I remembered that I hadn't opened this app in about a year and a half. It keeps shipping updates, and I no longer need it. I doubt I'm the only one. Sensor Tower's State of Mobile 2026 reports that users have 80 apps installed on average, and more than 60% of them are never opened in a given month. Only 9 get used on a typical day. Meanwhile the number of apps on Google Play has fallen from 3.4 million to about 1.58 million over the past two years, a drop of more than half. Google calls it a quality cleanup, but what got cleared were mostly apps nobody opened anyway. At the same time, time spent in AI assistant apps is up 426% year over year. One side is vanishing while the other swells. The apps that still bump their version numbers may not realize that users no longer remember them. The features remain and the entry point is gone Everyone is fighting for the super entry point. Apple is, OpenAI is, Google is. Once an entry point is established, it swallows the single-purpose independent apps around it. It doesn't set out to kill anyone. Users interact with it, and their needs get met along the way. In late March 2026, Bloomberg reported the core change in iOS 27: Siri becomes a standalone app, codenamed Campos, with a full conversation interface, history, and cross-app actions. Apple also plans to open Siri to third-party AI, with other models allowed in beyond ChatGPT. The operating system itself is turning into an AI platform. On the other side, OpenAI launched the ChatGPT Apps platform at DevDay 2025. Developers can embed their services in the chat window as mini-apps. The first partners were Booking.com, Expedia, Spotify, Figma, and Canva. In March 2026, AccuWeather came to ChatGPT with live weather, and ChatGPT Translate launched to take on Google Translate. VentureBeat's headline said it plainly: ChatGPT becomes the new app store. Ask Siri what tomorrow's weather in Hangzhou is, and it pulls the data and answers. Ask ChatGPT one question and the translation, exchange rate, or flight information comes out along the way. Through all of it you never opened a standalone app. The weather app is still there, and so are the translator and the calculator. But you no longer find the icon, tap in, and tap back out. The features haven't disappeared. What disappeared is the act of opening them. Everyone forgets