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Active installs is one of the 28 app marketplace metrics and concepts defined in the AppRanks glossary. This page gives you a clear, plain-language explanation of what Active installs means, why it matters when you evaluate an app, how AppRanks calculates and verifies it, and exactly where you will see it across our public app, audit, and comparison pages. Read on for the full definition, practical use cases, and links to related terms so you can interpret Active installs with confidence.
Also known as: install count, merchant count, active users, live installs, currently installed stores
The current number of stores that have an app installed and not uninstalled, as reported by the source marketplace. Active installs is a stronger growth signal than total downloads because it accounts for churn — an app with 50,000 downloads but 5,000 active installs has either a serious onboarding problem or a sunset use case. AppRanks displays the figure when the marketplace exposes it (Shopify shows it on most listings; Atlassian and Zendesk surface it for Cloud Fortified / Top Vendor apps only). We do not estimate when the marketplace doesn't publish the number — a missing install count is reported as unknown rather than a guess. Compare active-install velocity to review velocity to detect divergence: high installs + low reviews can signal a non-vocal user base or a friction-free workflow; the inverse usually means a churn problem.
Active installs separates an app's nominal market presence from its real one. Two apps with identical rating + review count can have wildly different active-install counts; the lower one usually has a hidden churn problem (onboarding friction, missing core feature for the category mainstream, stalled product roadmap) worth investigating before installing. Active installs is also one of the strongest leading indicators of marketplace ranking changes — an app whose active-install count is climbing typically moves up category position in the next 1-2 ranking cycles.