If you've been holding off on Procreate, Scrivener, or ProCam waiting for them to go on sale, you can stop. They probably won't.
We tracked 122 paid iPhone apps for a full year, from April 25, 2025 to April 25, 2026. Across the entire watchlist, only 28 apps had a single price drop. The other 94 stayed at sticker the whole year. Half the apps you've been waiting on aren't on Apple's quiet schedule. They're just at full price, and that's the price.
You've probably been waiting on the wrong iPhone apps
The "wait for a sale" instinct is real. It just gets misapplied. Most people pick it up from a handful of apps that genuinely do drop in price often, then they apply it universally to every paid app on the App Store. That's how you end up checking Procreate's page every couple of months for the past three years.
Of 122 paid iPhone apps in the watchlist, 77% never went on sale once in 12 months. The 23% that did discount produced just 54 events between them. Even the most active dropper had only six sales in the whole year. There is no app on the App Store running monthly discounts. The closest pattern is sporadic Q4 spikes and a few indie devs who coordinate sales twice a year.
So the question isn't "when will this app go on sale." For most apps, the question is "is this app actually one of the few that go on sale at all." The rest of this post answers that question, names names, and gives you four rules you can apply in 30 seconds before any iPhone app purchase. By the end you'll know whether to wait or just buy.
If you'd rather skip ahead, the Watchlist is the live list of apps that don't drop, and the deal tracker is the live list of ones that do.
The one iPhone app sale you can actually count on (Things 3, every Black Friday)
There is exactly one paid iPhone app in our dataset with a perfectly predictable annual sale. Things 3 has gone on sale every Black Friday weekend for 5 years running, always the same discount: $9.99 down to $6.99. Set a calendar reminder. Buy it then. That's the rule.
That predictability is the exception, not the norm. Most of the apps in our 28-dropper cohort discount sporadically, in clumps, or stop discounting entirely after a quiet pricing change. Things 3 is the only one with a clean, repeatable, calendar-keyed pattern.
The Things 3 rule
If you want Things 3, set a calendar reminder for the Friday after US Thanksgiving. You will pay $6.99 instead of $9.99 with near-certainty.
The reason this works is that Cultured Code (the developer) has effectively turned Black Friday into the Things 3 launch holiday. Every other day of the year, Things 3 sits at $9.99 and doesn't budge. The team isn't testing pricing or chasing flash promos. They run one sale, on one weekend, in a way buyers can plan around. If every paid iOS app worked like this, the App Store would be a different place. It doesn't, which is why Things 3 stands out so much in the data.
Most paid iPhone apps don't go on sale, period
Across 122 paid iPhone apps tracked across a full year, only 28 ever discounted. The other 94 stayed at sticker every single day. The 28 that did drop produced 54 events between them. Even the most active dropper, Week Agenda Ultimate, only managed 6 sales in 12 months.
The forum-and-Quora consensus is that App Store pricing has "no pattern, it depends on the developer." That's true at the level of any single app. Look at the population of paid iPhone apps as a whole, though, and a sharp pattern shows up. Apps cluster at the extremes. Most never discount. A few discount in clusters. The middle, where you'd expect "the average app drops once every couple of months," is almost empty.
A reader on the original Reddit thread put it better than the data does:
"I feel like a lot of people (myself included) get used to the idea of 'I'll wait for a sale,' but in reality that mostly comes from a few big apps that do frequent discounts. For most smaller apps, pricing seems much more static, so waiting doesn't really change anything." — General_Poet6391
That's the whole article in one paragraph. The wait-for-a-sale habit is real, it gets learned from the apps that do it often, and then your brain over-applies it. For 77% of paid iPhone apps, you're waiting for something that won't come.
The apps you should just buy at full price
If you only remember one rule, make it this: iPhone apps in the Graphics & Design category basically never go on sale. Every one of the 10 Graphics & Design apps in our watchlist had zero discount events in 12 months. Procreate, Nomad Sculpt, ibis Paint, Camera Lucida, all stable. Buy them at sticker, use them today.
Procreate is the heavyweight on this list. It launched on the App Store in March 2011, has been at $12.99 for years, and has zero recorded discount events in our tracker. 15 years on the App Store, no sale. That's not a coincidence. Procreate's audience is professional artists who buy it because the price is the price, not because it's on flash sale. Discounting would damage the brand the team has spent over a decade building. They've decided not to do it, and the data shows they keep that promise. The full Procreate price history confirms a stable line.
The same logic applies, with less drama, across most of the never-drops list. Scrivener at $23.99 is a writer's tool you commit to. Litchi at $24.99 is a drone-flight workhorse. PromptSmart Pro at $29.99 is the most expensive paid app in the watchlist and also stable. These are professional tools whose buyers don't price-shop.
The category rule
If your iPhone app is in Graphics & Design, just buy it. Of 10 we tracked, none ran any sale all year. The premium creative-tools category is the most discount-resistant in the data.
You can see why this matters: most "wait for a sale" guidance treats the App Store as one big undifferentiated market. It isn't. The category your app sits in tells you most of what you need to know about whether to wait or buy. Graphics & Design says buy. Indie game series says wait, then buy. Everything else, mostly, says buy.
When indie devs run portfolio sales (the Rusty Lake pattern)
A surprising pattern in the data: indie developers with multiple paid apps often coordinate sales across their entire catalog. The clearest example is Rusty Lake, the studio behind a series of atmospheric puzzle games. Five separate Rusty Lake titles in our watchlist all dropped in price three times each, on identical dates, like clockwork. The same dev moved his whole portfolio together.
The 5 titles are Rusty Lake Hotel, Rusty Lake Paradise, Rusty Lake: Roots, The Past Within, and Underground Blossom. Each dropped on April 30 / May 1 of 2025, again in late December 2025, and again on April 21, 2026. If you owned one of them and saw it drop, the other four probably dropped the same day.
Reader implication: when you see one app from an indie studio drop in price, immediately check the developer's other titles. You'll often find the whole catalog is on sale at the same time. The App Store doesn't surface this; you have to look. A price-history tool helps. The LumaFusion price history shows another version of this pattern, with three drops clustered between November and March. Following the dev on social media also helps.
The cadence-dies warning
ProCam was the textbook frequent dropper for years, with sales running roughly every 7 weeks. In March 2025 the pattern stopped completely. Zero drops since. If you're relying on a multi-year cadence to predict the next sale, verify recent activity. Patterns die without warning.
There's a second observation worth flagging, raised by another reader on the same Reddit thread:
"the only place where I expect discounts is with language learning apps. Outside of that, I rarely come across apps that actually go on sale." — General_Poet6391
That instinct is correct, but pointed at a different target. The major language-learning apps (Duolingo, Babbel, Memrise, HelloTalk) are all free downloads with in-app subscriptions, not paid up-front apps. They're outside the watchlist this article covers. The "discounts" you see from them are subscription deals (annual plans, Black Friday subscription promos), which work on a different mechanism than paid-app price drops. You're noticing real discounts; they're just on the subscription side, not the paid-app side.
When iPhone apps DO go on sale, it's usually November
If you can wait, wait until November. November alone produced 16 of 54 annual drops in our data, or 30%. Add December, and you're at 24 drops, or 44% of the year's total in 8 weeks. Outside Q4, drops are rare and unpredictable.
The shape of the year is steady from May through October at 1 to 4 drops per month. Then November explodes to 16. December is still elevated at 8. By January it crashes back to 2, and February in our window had zero drops at all. There's a small spring uptick (April 2026 had 6 drops, partly Rusty Lake's portfolio sale), but nothing close to the Q4 spike.
The calendar rule
For any iPhone app outside the never-drops cluster, set a price-tracker alert and wait until late November. You will catch nearly half of the year's total discount opportunities in those 8 weeks. February is dead. April has a small bump. Everything else is noise.
This shape matches what shoppers expect from physical retail (Black Friday, Cyber Monday, holiday gifting), and it shows up in iPhone app pricing too. The sharp difference: in physical retail, discounting happens across most categories. On the App Store, only a small slice of paid apps even participates in Q4 sales. Most stay at sticker through November and December the same as every other month.
The four-rule decision framework
Whether you should wait for a sale on any paid iPhone app comes down to four questions. Run them in order and you'll have a buy-or-wait answer in 30 seconds.
Rule 1: What category is the app in?
Graphics & Design: just buy it. 0 of 10 apps in this category dropped all year. Indie game series with a known portfolio (Rusty Lake, etc.): wait for the dev's twice-yearly coordinated sale. Photo & Video, Utilities, and Productivity: 80 to 89% never-drops, so probably buy. The category answers most of the question on its own.
Rule 2: Has the app discounted in the last 12 months?
Check the app's price history on a tracker. Zero drops in 12 months means the price is stable. Stop waiting. One drop in 12 months means it's possible but unpredictable, so buy if you need it. Three or more drops means the app does run sales, and a price-tracker alert is worth setting.
Rule 3: Is it a Things 3 / Black Friday case?
A handful of paid iPhone apps run reliable annual sales. Things 3 is the clearest example, with 5 consecutive Black Friday drops at the same price point. If your app is in this small camp (look for sales clustered on the same weekend year after year), set a calendar reminder for the Friday after US Thanksgiving and buy then.
Rule 4: Don't trust ancient cadence
A multi-year pattern can vanish overnight. ProCam ran roughly 7-week sales for years and stopped completely in March 2025, with zero drops since. Always verify the most recent 12 months specifically, not the developer's historical reputation. A price tracker that shows recent events, not just current price, is the only way to do this efficiently.
If you want to apply these rules without building a tracker yourself, AppRundown's Watchlist is the live list of paid iPhone apps that don't drop, and the deal tracker is the live list of ones that do, with cadence visible at a glance. Both refresh as new price events come in.
This piece is a follow-up to our earlier App Store rating gap study, which looked at how the displayed star rating drifts from what recent reviewers actually report. Together the two pieces cover the meta-question every iPhone shopper asks: should I buy this app, and should I buy it now or wait? The rating gap addresses "is this app actually any good." This piece addresses "is the price going to drop." Both have the same honest answer, which is "for most apps, the App Store doesn't tell you, and you have to look elsewhere."
Methodology
122 paid iPhone apps were tracked from AppRundown's deal-tracker watchlist, US App Store, English-language reviews, across the window April 25, 2025 to April 25, 2026. A "drop" is any price_cut or free_promo event in our app_price_events table, populated from daily Sensor Tower API snapshots. The watchlist has since grown to 149 apps; the cohort with at least one drop in the window is the same 28 apps, and the apps added since are all in the never-drops cluster. The dataset skews toward popular paid consumer iOS apps. It does not include freemium or subscription apps such as Duolingo, Babbel, or Spotify, which use a different pricing mechanism and aren't comparable to paid up-front apps. The full per-app dataset, methodology notes, and reproducible SQL are linked from the article header for any reader who wants to fork or verify.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do iPhone apps ever go on sale?
Rarely. Across 122 paid iPhone apps tracked for a year, only 28 (23%) had any drop, totaling 54 events between them. The other 94 stayed at sticker the whole year. The "wait for a sale" instinct comes from a small minority of apps that discount often.
Does Procreate ever go on sale?
Not in our records. Procreate launched on the App Store in March 2011, has been at $12.99 for years, and has zero discount events in our tracker. 15 years on the App Store, no sale. If you've been waiting, stop waiting and just buy it.
What iPhone app has the most reliable annual sale?
Things 3, every Black Friday weekend. We've recorded the same $9.99 to $6.99 drop on the Friday or Saturday after US Thanksgiving every year from 2021 to 2025. It's the only paid iPhone app in the watchlist with a clean 5-year repeating pattern.
What's the best month to buy paid iPhone apps on sale?
November. November alone produced 30% of all annual drops in our data, and November plus December combined produced 44%. Outside Q4, drops are rare and unpredictable. February in our window had zero drops at all.
Are there iPhone app categories that never go on sale?
Yes. Graphics & Design apps had a 0% drop rate in our watchlist, with 0 of 10 apps recording any discount event. Procreate, Nomad Sculpt, ibis Paint, and similar professional creative tools never ran a sale in our 12-month window. Buy them at full price.
In short
The "wait for a sale" habit gets learned from a small set of paid iPhone apps that genuinely do discount often, then misapplied to apps that won't. For 77% of paid iPhone apps in our watchlist, you're waiting on a sale that won't come. Things 3 every Black Friday is the only clockwork annual discount in the data. November and December produce 44% of all annual drops. Graphics & Design apps essentially never discount. The four rules above let you skip the waiting on most apps and time the rest to Q4. If you're still holding out for Procreate to drop, your time has more value than $12.99.
For ongoing live data, see the Watchlist and deal tracker. For the companion piece on rating accuracy, see the App Store rating gap study.