The longest-running language-learning ad on the App Store still belongs to Rosetta Stone, not to the category's biggest name. Apple's public data marks several of Rosetta Stone's search ads as running over a year, and they were still recorded on 16 July 2026. The app that spends the most, Pimsleur, cannot keep a single ad alive past 47 days. And Duolingo, the app most people name first, still runs no sustained App Store search ad at all: its longest in the set had been live 15 days.
We pulled every App Store ad these apps ran across EU storefronts from Apple's public Ad Repository, the transparency dataset the EU Digital Services Act requires. Here is the survivor board, measured by how long each app's longest still-live creative has stayed up. This is a monthly refresh of a report we first published in mid-July; the numbers below are the current pull. Data window ends 17 July 2026.
The survivor board
| App | Distinct creatives | Longest still-live creative | Total ad records tracked |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rosetta Stone | 8 | over 1 year ("Spanish, German, Korean & More", en-GB, still recorded 16 July 2026) | 83 |
| Busuu | 18 | 328 days ("Learn Spanish, French & More", en-GB, 9 countries, still recorded 16 July 2026) | 1,854 |
| Babbel | 15 | 307 days ("Speak Spanish, French & more", en-GB, 10 countries, still recorded 16 July 2026) | 5,573 |
| Pimsleur | 10 | 47 days ("Learn Foreign Words & Phrases", es-ES, still recorded 16 July 2026) | 6,448 |
| Duolingo | 7 | 15 days ("Englisch, Schach, Mathe, Musik", de-DE) | 24 |
A few readings of this table.
Rosetta Stone still treats ads as evergreen. It runs the fewest ad records here, 83, and yet almost every creative is a long-runner. Apple flags several as over a year old, in English, French, German, and Dutch, and they were still recorded this month. When an ad survives that long, it is paying for itself. Rosetta Stone found copy that works and left it alone.
The category grew two more year-class winners since we last checked. Busuu now keeps an English "Learn Spanish, French & More" line running 328 days across 9 countries, and Babbel runs a near-identical "Speak Spanish, French & more" 307 days across 10. Both are still live. A month ago neither had a still-live ad near this long. The long end of this board is filling in, and it is filling in with the same hook.
Pimsleur spends the most and keeps the least. Pimsleur ran 6,448 ad records, more than anyone in the category, and yet its longest-running creative lasts 47 days. It floods the storefronts and rotates constantly, and nothing sticks. Set that against Rosetta Stone, which ran 83 records and holds ads for over a year. Same category, opposite discipline. Record volume tells you who is busy; longevity tells you who found something that works.
Duolingo still barely plays here. The category's most-downloaded app ran only 24 App Store search records, across 7 short creatives, none past 15 days. Its growth engine is somewhere else. If you compete with Duolingo, App Store search is open ground: it is not defending it with sustained spend.
What the winners have in common
Two patterns hold across every long-runner in the set, and both got stronger this month.
They all buy search, not browse. Every long-running creative across all five apps ran in App Store search results, the placement you see after someone types a query, not the browse tab people see before searching. This category spends on intent, on the person already looking for a language app.
They lead with a list of languages. The copy that survives is almost never a benefit or a price. It is a list. Rosetta Stone runs "Spanish, German, Korean & More". Babbel runs "Speak Spanish, French & more". Busuu runs "Learn Spanish, French & More". Pimsleur runs "Learn Spanish, French & German". Four of the five longest-running lines in the category are the same sentence with a different verb. The angle that keeps paying in language learning is breadth, telling the searcher you teach the language they want. If you are writing your first App Store ad for a language app, that is the tested starting point, not a clever tagline.
How to read this for your own category
Longevity is the cheapest performance signal you can get for free. Nobody keeps funding an ad that loses money, so an ad still live after months is one that converts, and an app that spends heavily but holds nothing, the way Pimsleur does, is telling you its creative is not landing. Pull your own category the same way: list your three closest competitors, sort their ads by how long each has run, and write your first creatives against the survivors, not against whoever spends the most. Then check monthly, because a new long-runner appearing, the way Busuu's and Babbel's did since our last pull, is a rival finding a new winner.
You can pull any advertiser at recao.app, free, no account, in about a minute.
Method note: figures are computed from Apple's public Ad Repository (DSA Article 39), across 25 EU storefronts, data window ending 17 July 2026. This pull widened coverage from the five-market sample used in our first edition to all 25 EU storefronts, so record counts are higher than the earlier version and reflect fuller data. "Days running" is the span from a creative's first to last recorded impression across those markets; "over 1 year" is Apple's own marker for ads older than its reporting window. "Still live" means the creative was recorded on 16 July 2026, the last impression date in this window. Record counts are what the repository reports for each advertiser; per-country slices return the most recent records, so the analyzed sample can be smaller than the repository total. Memrise did not return a matching advertiser in the repository for this window and is omitted. Longevity is a proxy for performance, not a measured conversion rate. Refreshed monthly.