Apple’s App Store will be home to more than five million active apps by the end of 2020, according to SensorTower.

The app intelligence firm projects the App Store’s catalogue will grow from 2.93 million at the end of this year to 5.06 million by 2020, a 73 per cent growth rate over the period – equivalent of 2.13 million new titles.

The forecast, it said, is based on historical data and trends since the App Store’s launch in 2008 to today, and accounts for both iPhone and iPad products.

It noted that there were around 5,000 active apps on the App Store at the end of 2008, a figure which grew to 1.75 million seven years later, at the end of 2015.

Currently, there just over two million active apps, which it believes will grow to 2.93 million by the end of the year.

In terms of the types of new titles launching, SensorTower said the games category saw nearly 21,000 new additions in May 2016 worldwide, accounting for 43 per cent of a total of 48,231 apps debuting on the store that month.

Education, Entertainment, Business and Lifestyle were the other four top categories, out of 22 in total.

For Apple, SensorTower said it was important that the company makes “some significant steps” to improve discoverability, which it described as an evolving challenge as even more titles become available.

This includes significant changes required to the “navigation, curation and overall presentation of the App Store” to support an ecosystem that’s “twice the size just four years from now”.

Apple has recently been rolling out changes to the App Store to improve this very problem, such as implementing ads in its search, as well as adding new categories.