Andrew Madsen

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# How many apps use Swift in 2019?

Three years ago, I read a blog post by Ryan Olsen where he explored how many of the top 100 apps on the app store were using Swift. He was surprised that at the time, only 11% of the top 100 apps were using Swift (I wasn’t).

I thought it would be interesting to revisit this in early 2019. Swift has been out for going on 5 years now, Swift 5 will be released soon, and my perception is that Swift has been broadly adopted across the iOS development community. But, what do the numbers say?

I downloaded the top 100 free apps (give or take) on the app store on January 15, 2019. I decrypted them, then wrote a script that does some simple analysis of their contents to determine whether or not they’re using Swift, and roughly how much of the app is written in Swift.

Results

According to this analysis, of the top 110 apps on the app store on Janurary 15, 2019, 42% are using Swift, while 58% are not. If only non-game apps are considered, the results are 56% using Swift, 44% not.

Methodology