The biggest long-term threat to the leading app store providers is complacency, according to analyst firm Canalys. The company said that this manifests itself as “a remarkable lack of innovation and activity around improving app discovery, which is critical for the delivery of a high-quality experience to both consumers and developers.”

It noted that app store providers “rely too heavily on a standard set of basic tools,” such as search, a collection of featured titles, and top 100 charts. This means that a relatively small portion of the inventories are featured, and “the top app lists are all too often occupied by the same titles week after week.”

Tim Shepherd, senior analyst for the company, said: “We estimate that up to two-thirds of the apps in leading consumer app store catalogues receive fewer than 1,000 downloads in their first year, and a significant proportion of those get none at all. Many high-quality apps never get the attention they deserve.”

According to Canalys, in fortnightly snapshots taken of the US market over a 16-week period, almost half the titles in the top 100 paid lists appeared in every listing –  58 titles on Google Play and 41 in the App Store occupied spaces in the top 100 lists in all eight surveys. Free apps exhibited a similar pattern, with 42 titles on Google Play and 31 on the App Store present across the period.

Adam Daum, the company’s chief analyst, noted that the poor quality of discovery tools threaten app store providers’ control of the discovery process. “Even if an external portal sends traffic back to the native store to start a download or complete the purchase, the damage has been done. The store provider has lost consumer engagement, trust and opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell,” he said.