Fastic has kept a single App Store ad running for 262 days, longer than any other calorie counter in Europe. That is over eight months on one creative, a Spanish line reading "Proteínas, Tracker, Nutrición." No rival has held a winner that long. The number that sits next to it tells the other half of the story: Cal AI, the fastest-rising app in this category, runs 20 different creatives right now and holds none of them past 22 days.
We pulled every App Store ad these apps ran across major European markets from Apple's public Ad Repository, the transparency dataset the EU Digital Services Act requires. Here is the survivor board, sorted by how long each app's longest creative has stayed live. Data window ends 9 July 2026.
The survivor board
| App | Distinct creatives | Longest-running creative | Total ad records tracked |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fastic | 10 | 262 days ("Proteínas, Tracker, Nutrición", ES) | 488 |
| Foodvisor | 11 | 248 days ("Monitora Cibo e Perdi Peso", IT) | 395 |
| Bevel | 17 | 184 days ("Ejercicio, Sueño, Recupera", ES) | 770 |
| Lifesum | 13 | 166 days ("Food Tracker & Voedingsapp", NL) | 472 |
| MacroFactor | 4 | 126 days ("Calorie, Nutrition, Food, Diet") | 12 |
| Lose It | 2 | 48 days ("Calorie Counter, Food Diary") | 5 |
| Fitia | 2 | 24 days ("Bajar de Peso. Dieta Saludable", ES) | 353 |
| Cal AI | 20 | 22 days ("AI food scanner, macros & diet", 5 markets) | 71 |
A few readings of this table:
- Cal AI runs the most creatives and holds none. Twenty distinct ads live, and its longest has been up 22 days. That is pure test velocity. It is still hunting for a line that pays, cycling ideas fast to find one.
- Fastic and Foodvisor found the line and keep funding it. Fewer creatives (10 and 11), but their best ones have run 262 and 248 days, both past eight months. An ad that survives that long is one that converts. Nobody keeps paying for a loser.
- Volume and conviction are two different bets. Cal AI is buying its way in with speed and count. The incumbents are sitting on winners. Both are rational; they are just at different points in the same category.
Where these apps buy
Every ad in this board ran in App Store search results, the placement you see after typing a query. None of them bought browse placements like the Today tab. That fits the product. Nobody stumbles onto a calorie tracker while browsing; they go looking for one after deciding to log their food. This is a search-intent category, and the spend follows the intent.
What the winning copy says
The angle that keeps paying here is the plain benefit stack, written in the local language. Protein, macros, nutrition, weight loss, stated flatly. Fastic's 262-day survivor is "Proteínas, Tracker, Nutrición." Foodvisor's 248-day one is "Monitora Cibo e Perdi Peso" (track food and lose weight). Lifesum's runs 166 days on "Food Tracker & Voedingsapp" in Dutch.
The survivors are localized per market, not reinvented per market. The winning concept gets translated: Fastic's protein-tracker-nutrition line shows up in Spanish, Italian, French, and Dutch variants of the same idea. One angle that works, carried across borders in each country's language. That is the pattern for a first App Store ad in this category: the benefit stack in your market's tongue, tested against the survivors above.
How to read this for your own category
Longevity is the cheapest performance signal you can read for free. An advertiser who keeps an ad live for eight months is telling you that ad makes money, because they would kill it otherwise. Pull your own category the same way. List your three closest rivals, sort their ads by how long each has run, and write your first creatives against the survivors, not against the ones that got cycled out last week. Watch the split between count and hold time: a rival running 20 creatives with no long-runner is still searching, and a rival sitting on one 200-day ad has already found the answer you can copy. Check monthly, because a new long-runner appearing means someone just found 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 major EU storefronts (DE, FR, ES, IT, NL), data window ending 9 July 2026. "Days running" is the span from a creative's first to last recorded impression across those markets. "Distinct creatives" groups ad records by placement, format, headline, and asset count. Yazio, Yuka, and MyFitnessPal did not return a matching advertiser entity in the repository for this window and are omitted. Longevity is a proxy for performance, not a measured conversion rate. Refreshed monthly.