The longest-running language-learning ad on the App Store 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 live in July 2026. Duolingo, the app most people name first, 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 five major European markets (Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and the UK) 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 creative has stayed live. Data window ends 8 July 2026.
The survivor board
| App | Distinct creatives | Longest-running creative | Creatives live 30+ days |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rosetta Stone | 6 | Over a year (Apple's longest marker) | 6 of 6 |
| Busuu | 14 | 215 days | 8 |
| Babbel | 8 | 77 days | 2 |
| Pimsleur | 7 | 68 days | 6 |
| Duolingo | 5 | 15 days | 0 |
A few readings of this table:
- Rosetta Stone treats ads as evergreen. Every one of its six creatives is a long-runner, and Apple flags several as live over a year. When an ad survives that long, it is paying for itself. Rosetta Stone found copy that works and left it alone.
- Busuu is the busiest sustained advertiser. Fourteen distinct creatives, eight of them past a month, the longest at 215 days (first seen 4 December 2025, still live 7 July 2026). This is an account testing steadily and keeping the winners.
- Duolingo barely plays here. The category's most-downloaded app ran only five App Store search creatives in these markets, 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.
They all buy search, not browse. Every single creative, across all five apps, ran in App Store search results, the placement you see after someone types a query. None ran in the search tab, the browse surface people see before searching. This category spends on intent, on the person already looking for a language app, not on discovery.
They lead with a list of languages. The copy that survives is almost never a benefit or a price. It is a list: "Learn Spanish, French & German" (Pimsleur), "Inglés, francés, alemán y más" (Babbel), "Hablar inglés, francés, alemán" (Busuu), "Spanish, German, Korean & More" (Rosetta Stone). 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. 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. Then check monthly, because a new long-runner appearing 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 the DE, FR, ES, IT, and GB storefronts, data window ending 8 July 2026. "Days running" is the span from a creative's first to last recorded impression across those markets; "over a year" is Apple's own marker for ads older than its reporting window. 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.