Counted, not ranked
Which apps and themes Shopify stores actually run
Every other list of popular Shopify apps is either the App Store's own ordering — which measures listing position and reviews, not installations — or an opinion. This counts storefronts: 36 of them, one reading each, read the way a shopper sees them.
Apps, by how many storefronts load them
| App | Stores | Share of 32 |
|---|---|---|
| Google Tag Manager | 18 | 56.3% |
| Klaviyo | 15 | 46.9% |
| Attentive | 7 | 21.9% |
| Recharge | 7 | 21.9% |
| Rebuy | 6 | 18.8% |
| Gorgias | 4 | 12.5% |
| Judge.me | 4 | 12.5% |
| Yotpo | 4 | 12.5% |
| Meta pixel | 3 | 9.4% |
| Microsoft Advertising | 2 | 6.3% |
| Hotjar | 1 | 3.1% |
| TikTok pixel | 1 | 3.1% |
| Trustpilot | 1 | 3.1% |
12.5% of readable storefronts load no app we recognise at all. That is a real finding and not a gap: plenty of stores run only admin-side apps.
Themes
100% of the 1 storefronts that publish their theme are running something that did not come from Shopify’s Theme Store — custom-built, bought elsewhere, or forked far enough to drop the id.
We are not printing a league table of theme names, because they do not aggregate: of the 20 stores that publish one, no name appears twice. Established stores each run their own custom build with its own internal name, so a table would be 20 rows at one store each. It will appear here when names start repeating.
What these numbers are, and are not
Each storefront was read from its public pages only: no login, nothing installed, no customer or order data. An app is counted only where its own host loads on the storefront. That means admin-only apps are invisible here, and so is any app a store proxies through its own domain — so every share below is a floor, never a ceiling.
And the sample is honest about itself: these are stores somebody chose to look up, not a random draw from Shopify. It describes the stores people investigate, which is a useful thing and a different thing from the platform as a whole.
One reading per store, most recent wins. A store looked up fifty times counts once, or this would measure our traffic instead of the platform.
Use these figures
Published under CC BY 4.0: quote them anywhere with attribution. Machine-readable at /shopify-app-usage.json, every figure carrying the sample it came from.
Suggested line: Instilus Shopify storefront technology usage (36 stores) — https://www.instilus.com/shopify-app-usage
These counts grow every time somebody looks a store up. Look up a store → and its reading joins the next version of this page.