How this is measured

The Shopify App Store has no public API. Category listing pages are server-rendered, and each app card carries its handle, name, rating, review count, pricing label and Built-for-Shopify badge in the markup. Walking the category tree from the seven top-level categories reaches 127 categories, 89 of which are leaves exposing a paginated view of every app in them. Crawling every leaf and deduplicating by handle gives the census.

Reviews are ten to a page, newest first, and the pagination goes back to an app's first review. Each one carries a stable id, a date, a star rating, the merchant's name and country, and how long they had been using the app when they wrote it. That last field is the reason this exists.

What we do not do. The store's robots file disallows any URL carrying a search query, so keyword positions are not tracked here. Requests are paced, and the crawler halves its own concurrency every time the store pushes back, only widening again after a long clean run.

The limit worth repeating. Tenure is observed at the review, not at churn, so it is a floor rather than a duration, and reviewers are a self-selecting minority of merchants. Nothing here is a churn rate.