How often do mobile apps change their artwork?
In 42 open-source mobile apps from October 2025 to October 2026, 1,750 changes touched artwork, but only 83 swapped art in an existing screen, and about 60 to 90 could have shipped without an app release. Half the apps had none; the median app had 0.5 a year. Six apps had one in five or more months, mostly around promo cards, remote messages, onboarding and empty states.
How was this measured?
From public git history, October 9, 2025 to October 9, 2026, in 42 actively developed open-source iOS, Android, React Native and Expo, and Flutter apps. For monorepos, only the mobile directories were measured. Each change on the default branch's first-parent line counts once, so a merged pull request counts once. A change counts if it added, modified or deleted raster images (PNG, JPEG, WebP, GIF, HEIC, AVIF), vectors (SVG, asset-catalog PDF, Android vector XML) or Lottie; tests, snapshot images, docs and store metadata are excluded.
AI agents labeled every change from its subject, changed paths and code size, and read the pull request when the case was ambiguous. Each change got one label, and a flag if a remote image slot could plausibly have shipped it without a release. A second labeler relabeled 120 changes (60 flagged, 60 not) without seeing the first labels. They agreed on 85% of labels; 43 of the 60 flagged changes stayed flagged, and 1 of the 60 unflagged changes was flagged. So the 85 flagged changes are probably about 60 to 90.
What kinds of artwork changes happen?
| Label | Changes | Share |
|---|---|---|
| UI icons and third-party logos | 699 | 40% |
| Cleanup: deletions, compression, moves | 428 | 24% |
| New art shipped with a feature | 417 | 24% |
| App icon or launch art | 86 | 5% |
| Art swap in an existing screen | 83 | 5% |
| Unclear | 37 | 2% |
Campaigns ship as features: 110 changes were tied to a campaign or season, and nearly all shipped with code. Most swaps touched code too; only 26 of the 83 changed images alone.
Which apps changed artwork that could have skipped a release?
Twenty-one of the 42 apps had at least one such change in the year, and 21 had none. Six had one in five or more months. The counts below use the first labels, before the recheck.
What does this mean if you are deciding whether to move images out of the app?
Monthly need is the exception. The median app here had 0.5 changes a year that could plausibly have shipped without a release, and 21 of the 42 had none. If your app looks like that half, a bundled image and an occasional release is fine, and you do not need a tool for it.
The apps that did it often all have growth or marketing surfaces: in-app promo cards, remote messages, onboarding and empty states. Those are the screens worth checking first. Open-source apps are engineering-led, so consumer apps with marketing teams probably change artwork more often than this; treat these numbers as a floor.
Most artwork work is not swaps. Icons, cleanup and new art for new features make up nearly nine in ten changes. For the cleanup part, the free image audit lists duplicates and oversized files.
What are the limits of this study?
- Open-source apps are not a random sample of commercial apps.
- Git history shows changes that happened, not changes a team wanted and skipped because a release was needed.
- Labels come from commit subjects, paths and code size, not from looking at the images.
- One labeling pass plus a 120-change blind recheck.
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