iOS Apps with Older Release Records: A Zombie App Research List

I scrape the App Store every day for CloneChart. 24,451 apps in the database right now. The point is to find apps worth cloning. Boring tools, niche utilities, things one indie dev built and a million people quietly use.

Somewhere around app number 8,000, I noticed a pattern.

A bunch of apps had really good ratings. Like, 4.8s and 4.9s. With tens of thousands of reviews. And the last update was three years ago.

I built a filter to count them. Rating ≥ 4 stars. Reviews ≥ 1,000. Last update before January 2024.

287 apps.

These aren't dead apps. They still rank in the App Store. People are still finding them, downloading them, leaving reviews. The reviews from the last six months are mostly one-stars, and they all say some version of “Used to be amazing. Hasn't been updated in years. Crashes on the new iOS. Where did you go?”

Each one is a graveyard with fans still leaving flowers.

This post is a tour of the 15 most interesting ones, and a complete list of all 287 at the bottom. Every app has a clone prompt waiting at CloneChart. Paste it into Cursor or Claude Code and ship a replacement.

Some of these are easier than they look.

What counts as a “zombie app”

Three rules. All have to be true:

• Rating of 4.0 or higher. The app was actually good
• At least 1,000 reviews. Real audience, not vanity metrics
• No update since January 1, 2024. Long enough that anyone running iOS 18 is feeling the rot

I'm not counting apps that were always bad. I'm not counting apps with 50 reviews from the dev's family. These are apps that worked for thousands of people, and then the person making them just… stopped.

Why? Boring stuff, mostly. Indie devs get day jobs. Founders pivot to a new idea. iOS ships a breaking update and fixing it isn't worth a week of unpaid labor. Sometimes a startup gets quietly acqui-hired and the app keeps “running” but no one's paid to maintain it.

Whatever the reason, the audience didn't go anywhere. They're still searching the App Store for that thing the app did. And the original is broken.

If you can ship a replacement, even a slightly worse one, even a slightly different one, there's a market sitting there with money out and nowhere to spend it.

This is the cleanest indie opportunity I know of. Better than building something new, because the demand is already proven. Better than competing with active apps, because nobody's defending these search results.

Here are the 15 best ones I've seen.

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The 15 Most Cloneable Zombies

1. My Love: Relationship Counter

846,168 reviews. 4.9 stars. Last update: May 2023.
Lifestyle. Built by Bjoern Bartels.

Nearly a million people loved this app. It was a relationship-milestone tracker. Countdown to your anniversary, “the 333rd day,” “the 50th month,” widget on the home screen, push notifications for special dates.

Then Bjoern stopped shipping. The reviews from the last year are couples who downloaded it because their friend recommended it, opened it, and watched it crash on iOS 18.

The reviews are a free product spec. People are telling you exactly what to build next: more milestone customization, social sharing, a working IAP. Three weeks of work for a focused indie. The audience is 846,168 people deep.

This is the layup of the list. If I had to clone one app on this entire page, it'd be this one.

Read the full spotlight >

2. Solitaire by MobilityWare

134,559 reviews. 4.8 stars. Last update: May 2020.
Games. Built by MobilityWare.

Solitaire is in the public domain. The app is just a really good solitaire client. Clean UI, daily challenges, statistics. Five years without an update.

Solitaire is one of the most-searched terms in the App Store, every single day. There are dozens of clones already. There's room for one more.

The trick with solitaire is monetization, not gameplay. Look at the reviews and you'll see exactly which ad placements people hate, which IAPs feel sleazy, which features they wish were free. Build the version they describe in the one-stars.

Read the full spotlight >

3. Tide Charts

109,587 reviews. 4.8 stars. Last update: June 2022.
Weather. Built by 7th Gear.

The most boring app on the list, and one of the best opportunities. Surfers, fishermen, boaters. They all need tide data, and they pay for it. NOAA gives the data away for free. The “app” is just a nice frontend.

Four years without an update. Tide stations get added and removed, the API contracts shift, things break. The fans are getting angry.

A single dev with two weeks and an LLM can ship a better one.

Read the full spotlight >

4. Gboard. The Google Keyboard

55,630 reviews. 4.0 stars. Last update: May 2022.
Utilities. Built by Google.

Yes, that Google. They shipped Gboard for iOS, got a few million users, then quietly walked away. Last update was almost four years ago.

The stored listing shows more than 55,000 reviews and a May 2022 latest-release date. Those fields do not establish Google's current plans, active audience size, competition, or commercial opportunity; verify each point before using this record for product research.

You're not going to clone Google's swipe model in a weekend. But the basic premise, a third-party iOS keyboard with custom themes, AI suggestions, a built-in search, is wide open, and the moat is whoever ships first with active maintenance.

Read the full spotlight >

5. JotNot Scanner App Pro

29,995 reviews. 4.9 stars. Last update: December 2020.
Business. Built by MobiTech 3000 LLC.

Scanner apps are the canonical indie clone target. Every consultant, real-estate agent, and tax preparer needs one. The premium ones charge $5-10/month for what amounts to “take a photo, run an OCR, save as PDF.”

JotNot was one of the best, and the dev hasn't shipped in five years.

Vision API has gotten enormously better since 2020. A new clone with modern OCR and Apple's PDFKit can ship in a weekend and beat the original on quality.

Read the full spotlight >

6. Solv: Easy Same-Day Healthcare

25,841 reviews. 4.9 stars. Last update: January 2023.
Medical.

Find an urgent-care clinic near you, see the wait time, book the slot. Used by parents, travelers, anyone who can't get a same-day appointment with their PCP. 25,000 reviews and a 4.9 star rating means people love this thing.

Three years dormant. Wait-time APIs change. Insurance integrations rot. The competitors (Zocdoc, Solv's own bigger product) are clunky.

This is the kind of app a small team, or one motivated solo founder, can rebuild and license to a regional health system for serious money.

Read the full spotlight >

7. Delectable: Scan & Rate Wine

25,680 reviews. 4.7 stars. Last update: September 2021.
Food & Drink.

Scan a wine label, get the rating, save it to your cellar. Wine people are obsessive and they pay for tools. Five years without an update means the label-recognition model is ancient and the price-comparison data is worthless.

Vivino exists and is fine, but it's bloated and ad-stuffed. The Delectable audience misses the simpler version.

Read the full spotlight >

8. Star Walk: Find Stars & Planets

25,019 reviews. 4.7 stars. Last update: May 2023.
Education.

Hold your phone up to the sky, see the stars labeled. AR planetarium with offline data. Parents buy these for kids, teachers buy them for classrooms, hobbyists buy them for camping trips.

Vito Technology shipped a great one in 2008 and stopped meaningful updates a few years ago. ARKit is a different animal in 2026 than it was when this shipped.

Read the full spotlight >

9. SuperCook Recipe By Ingredient

21,194 reviews. 4.8 stars. Last update: June 2022.
Food & Drink.

Tell it what's in your fridge. It tells you what to cook. The original was scraping recipes from a few sites and matching them with a basic ingredient parser. The reviews say it was magical when it worked.

A 2026 version with an LLM in the loop is a different product entirely. Ingredient inference, dietary restrictions, “I don't have eggs but I have flax meal”. All things that used to take a backend full of rules and now take three lines of prompt.

Read the full spotlight >

10. Kindara: Fertility Tracker

10,105 reviews. 4.7 stars. Last update: September 2021.
Medical.

Fertility-awareness method tracking. Temperatures, symptoms, cycle predictions. The audience is deeply loyal and deeply underserved. Big-app alternatives (Flo, Clue) have moved hard toward generalized period tracking and the FAM crowd doesn't trust them with the data anymore.

The reviews are full of women begging Kindara to come back. Build a privacy-first replacement, charge a one-time fee, post about it on the right Reddit forums, and you have a sustainable indie product in a month.

Read the full spotlight >

11. Reigns

7,612 reviews. 4.8 stars. Last update: August 2019.
Games. Built by Devolver.

Tinder-but-for-being-a-medieval-king. Swipe left or right on advisors' suggestions, manage four resource meters, try not to die. The mechanic is the whole game and it's been cloned dozens of times in the boardgame and indie-game space already.

Devolver is a publisher, not a maintainer. They shipped Reigns and forgot it. The mechanic is yours for the taking. Pick a different setting (CEO, dating, dungeon master, ER doctor) and ship.

Read the full spotlight >

12. Getting Over It

6,672 reviews. 4.3 stars. Last update: July 2021.
Games. Built by Bennett Foddy.

Bennett Foddy famously encouraged clones of his earlier work (QWOP). The Getting Over It mechanic, a guy in a pot, a hammer, an unforgiving mountain, is one of the most memeable in mobile gaming.

The mechanic is the asset. Different art, different theme, same unforgiving physics. There's a market and Foddy's not defending it.

Read the full spotlight >

13. Unpacking

6,239 reviews. 4.8 stars. Last update: August 2023.
Games. Built by Witch Beam (published by Humble).

Cozy puzzle game where you unpack moving boxes and arrange the contents. The story is told entirely through the objects. Won a BAFTA. Beloved.

The actual gameplay is straightforward. Drag, place, satisfy room constraints. The art and narrative are what made it special. A clone with a different setting (a college dorm, a family inheritance, a spy's safehouse) writes itself.

Read the full spotlight >

14. Pocket City

5,094 reviews. 4.7 stars. Last update: November 2022.
Games. Built by Codebrew Games (one person, Dan Vargas).

The “SimCity-killer” built by one indie dev. He shipped Pocket City 1, made enough to live, then moved on to other things. The original is still on the App Store and it still works, but it hasn't gotten new content in three years.

City builders are evergreen. The audience is loyal. The mechanics are well-understood. This is one of the most encouraging stories on the list. A single developer built a SimCity competitor and made real money. You can do it again.

Read the full spotlight >

15. Papers, Please

1,182 reviews. 4.7 stars. Last update: July 2023.
Games. Built by 3909 (Lucas Pope).

The lowest review count on the list, but every one of those 1,182 reviews is a love letter. Document-checking dystopian puzzle game. Cult favorite. The mechanic, pattern-matching identity papers against shifting rules, is genuinely unique and totally cloneable in a different setting.

Pope's a perfectionist who ships rarely. A “Papers, Please but for [insert profession]” clone is the kind of game indie developers genuinely admire.

Read the full spotlight >

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The Full List of 287 Zombie Apps

Sorted by review count. Click any spotlight for the clone prompt, recommended stack, and the original app's user complaints (which is your feature roadmap).

The data updates daily. New zombies are added when apps cross the criteria thresholds. Some of the apps on this list will get updates and graduate off. When they do, they get removed.

What I'm Doing With This

CloneChart tracks all 24,451 iOS apps in the App Store. The Zombie list is one of about a dozen filters I run. There's also a Trending list for apps blowing up right now, a category-by-category breakdown, and a difficulty filter so you can find apps a solo dev can actually ship.

Every app gets an AI-generated clone prompt. Paste it into Cursor or Claude Code and start. Every app has an estimated tech stack and complexity rating. Every app links back to its App Store page so you can read the reviews and see what to fix.

If you're a vibe coder, an indie hacker, a weekend builder. This is the database I wish I'd had when I started.

Free to browse. Email signup at the top of the homepage gets you the daily zombie drop. One new app, three sentences, the clone prompt.

clonechart.io >

FAQ

How does the Zombie filter select apps?
It uses stored rating, review-count, and latest-release fields. These signals do not prove abandonment, current maintenance status, demand, or developer intent, so verify the live App Store listing and independent evidence.

Is it legal to clone these apps?
Cloning the concept is legal. Cloning the expression is not. You can build “an app that tracks relationship milestones”, that's an idea and ideas aren't copyrightable. You can't copy the My Love icon, screenshots, name, or specific UI. Pick a different name, design your own UI, and you're fine. If the app is a major IP (a famous game, a known brand), I leave it off the flagship list, but you can find the clone prompts at your own discretion.

What stack should I use to clone these?
For native iOS, the modern indie default is Swift + SwiftUI for the app, Supabase or Firebase for backend, and RevenueCat for in-app purchases. For cross-platform, React Native + Expo. Almost every clone prompt on CloneChart specifies a recommended stack based on the original app's complexity.

How often does this list update?
The scraper runs daily. New zombies are added as soon as apps cross the criteria thresholds. The blog post you're reading is a snapshot from the date at the top. For the live list, see clonechart.io/chart/zombie.

What's a vibe coder?
Someone who builds with AI tools instead of fighting syntax. Cursor, Claude Code, v0, Lovable, Bolt. Describe the outcome, ship the implementation. The 287 apps on this list are perfect targets. Small enough scope to ship in days, big enough audience to make the math work.

Can I get the clone prompts in bulk?
Each clone prompt is on its app's CloneChart page. There's no bulk export today. If enough people ask, I'll build it.

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Found a zombie app I missed? Reply to me on X and I'll add it to the next scrape.