Jaden Schaefer

But it was a lot of work for us to achieve that and to be able to bring that down.

I think a lot of other people struggle with that, too.

According to their 2026 state of subscription apps report, AI apps experienced significantly higher churn compared to traditional apps.

So this is interesting, right?

Like it's not just like, oh, people try more software and they use less today.

Well, people actually still keep a lot of their OG apps that they have and OG subscriptions, but it's the new AI ones that they're just trying out this new buzz thing.

Oh, look, you can do this crazy cool thing and make an image of me looking like X, Y, Z. You go try it and then you kind of dump it.

So

According to the report, they analyzed more than 1 billion in-app subscription transactions, and that was about $11 billion in annual developer revenue.

I mean, based off of their scale and their ecosystem, I think this is a pretty good indicator.

They have like iOS, Android, and web apps.

and what's interesting to me is that you know despite like i think a lot of the hype around ai most subscription apps are not built around it only 27 of apps analyzed according to their report were categorized as ai powered about 72 of those are just non-ai apps so a majority of apps and this is interesting because i think we see a lot of the bigger players like immediately injecting ai in but i think a lot of the smaller apps and companies are like well if we don't need it maybe there's not a reason to just you know bolt something on that's not necessary

And that's making up almost 73% of all apps.

I think what is obviously pretty clear is how fast AI adoption is accelerating.

About one in four apps now marketing themselves are marketing themselves as AI driven.

So a lot of those are not necessarily going to be ChatGPT or Gemini, but they might just be an app that has some AI features in their product experience, which

I think a lot of people should be and could be experimenting with.

And there's a lot of things that I can do just inside of all traditional SaaS.

I do think this is a smart idea for most any apps.

I think definitely the categories that are adopting AI faster than others would be things like photo and video apps.