What percentage of mobile apps have a dedicated empty-state screen?

46% of tracked apps have an explicit empty-state screen — 370 of 809.^[1] That puts intentional empty states just below the halfway mark, on par with in-flow upsells and ahead of social login (41%).^[2] A designed empty state is common enough to be a best-practice signal, but more than half of apps still ship without one.

370 of 809 tracked apps (46%) have an explicit empty-state screen — July 2026.

Lazyweb Research · n=809 · Published 2026-07-07

mobileux-patternsdesignonboarding

The finding

Explicit empty-state screens appear in 370 of 809 apps (45.7%).^[1] That's slightly below social-adjacent essentials but comfortably ahead of paywalls (38%) and referral (25%).^[2] Nearly half of apps intentionally design the zero-data moment — the other half leave it blank or generic.

How to apply this

Empty states are a cheap, high-leverage win precisely because they're not universal — shipping a good one puts you in the more polished half of the corpus. Use them to teach the first action (add your first item, connect a source, invite a teammate) rather than just showing 'nothing here.' They pair naturally with onboarding and activation goals. If your app has lists, feeds, or collections that start empty, this is 46%-common table stakes for a considered experience.

Caveats

Lower bound: counts apps where an empty-state screen was captured among median 41 screens.^[3] Empty states are easy to miss in capture, so true prevalence is likely higher than 46%. Deduped by company; base 809 (751 tagged).^[3]

The numbers

Stat	Computed from
370 of 809 apps (45.7%) have an empty-state screen	prevalence_empty_state
social login 329 (40.7%), paywall 305 (37.7%), referral 205 (25.3%)	prevalence_social_login, prevalence_paywall_screen, prevalence_referral_invite
Universe 809 apps, median 41 captured screens	universe_denominators

Methodology. Universe: 809 mobile apps with at least one captured screenshot. Method: empty-state tag match deduped by COUNT(DISTINCT company_name), July 2026. Caveat: lower bound, likely undercounted.

Sources & citations

[1] Lazyweb Research analysis of 809 mobile apps (apps with >=1 captured screenshot), July 2026. 370 distinct companies with an empty-state tag match over 809. ↩
[2] Lazyweb Research analysis of 809 mobile apps (apps with >=1 captured screenshot), July 2026. Comparison patterns deduped by company. ↩
[3] Lazyweb Research analysis of 809 mobile apps (apps with >=1 captured screenshot), July 2026. Lower bound; empty states are easily missed in capture. ↩

Source: Lazyweb Research — proprietary analysis of real, in-market app screens. Cite as Lazyweb Research, 2026-07-07.