The two longest-surviving App Store advertisers in plant identifier apps are the same company. Glority Global Group runs PictureThis and Plant Parent as separate apps under separate names, and each one holds an ad that Apple marks as older than its one-year window and that was still recorded on 22 July 2026. Together those two apps account for 2,778 ad records, more than any single rival bought in the same year.
We pulled every App Store ad twelve plant apps ran across all 25 EU storefronts from Apple's public Ad Repository, the transparency dataset the EU Digital Services Act requires, plus one adjacent camera-identifier app for comparison. Here is the survivor board, sorted by how long each app's oldest still-running creative has been live. Data window ends 23 July 2026, and no storefront query failed on this sweep.
The survivor board
| App | Distinct creatives | Oldest creative still running | Total ad records tracked |
|---|---|---|---|
| PictureThis (Glority Global Group) | 20 | Past Apple's one-year window, "Plant care and identification", 10 countries | 1,830 |
| Plant Parent (Glority Global Group) | 14 | Past Apple's one-year window, "Identify, Diagnose & Reminders", 15 countries | 948 |
| Plant Identifier & Care App (Botan App Limited) | 14 | Past Apple's one-year window, "Scan all this leaf, flower", 17 countries | 923 |
| Blossom (Mosaic S.r.l.) | 2 | Past Apple's one-year window, "Bäume und Blumen bestimmen", Germany and Austria (last recorded 14 July) | 8 |
| PlantIn (Vortemol) | 23 | 334 days, "Identificador de plantas・flora", Portugal | 1,516 |
| Planta (Planta AB) | 11 | 239 days, "Happy Life, Happy Plants!", Germany and Austria | 510 |
| PlantScope (Scale Global Technology) | 20 | 115 days, "Pflanzendiagnose & Pflegetipps", Germany and Austria | 190 |
| Plant Care Tracker Ploi (solo developer) | 8 | 106 days, "Water Reminder & Journal", 16 countries | 242 |
| PlantAID (VOCALBEATS.AI) | 10 | 48 days, "Diagnosi, Promemoria e Cura", Italy | 70 |
| Plantum (AIBY) | 24 | None. Every creative last recorded 14 May 2026 | 158 |
| Plant Care App Plantoto (solo developer) | 5 | None. Last creative stopped 4 July 2026 | 17 |
| AI Plant Doctor (solo developer) | 17 | None. All 17 stopped by 4 May 2026 | 59 |
Five readings of this table.
- The top two share a publisher and share nothing else. Glority runs PictureThis across 18 storefronts and Plant Parent across 22, and the copy pulls in opposite directions. PictureThis names the thing it does: "Plant care and identification". Plant Parent lists features: "Identify, Diagnose & Reminders". Both lines are past Apple's one-year window, both were still recorded on 22 July 2026. One company, two apps, two survivor headlines, and if you only tracked app names you would read that as two independent winners.
- A generic name in slightly broken English outlasts every brand line here. Botan App Limited's app is called "Plant Identifier & Care App" and its English headline reads "Scan all this leaf, flower". That creative runs in 17 storefronts, Apple dates it past the one-year window, and it was still recorded on 22 July. Six of Botan's creatives are past that window and all six were recorded that same day, on 923 records total. No brand name in the headline, and the English does not quite parse.
- The best-known independent brand has the smallest map. Planta AB shows up in 6 of the 25 storefronts: Austria, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden. Its two year-plus lines, one Italian and one Swedish, both went dark on 10 May 2026. What it still has running is a single English headline, "Happy Life, Happy Plants!", live 239 days in Germany and Austria. That is the whole of Planta's current EU search-ad presence.
- Plantum had four languages past a year and turned all of them off. German, English, French and Italian creatives, all older than Apple's window, all last recorded on 14 May 2026. Its product-page creatives stopped a year before that, on 28 July 2025. Plantum bought coverage in all 25 storefronts and only 158 records to spread across them, which reads as testing rather than scaling, and the test ended in May.
- PlantIn covers the most ground and rebuilt its copy in February. All 25 storefronts, 1,516 records, 23 creatives. Its year-plus line, "Tree Health scanner・Care App", stopped in Estonia and Latvia on 28 July 2025. The English line it runs now, "Plant Finder & Disease ID App" across 19 countries, and its German line both started on the same day, 6 February 2026. The only creatives that survived the rebuild are Iberian: Portuguese at 334 days and Spanish at 306.
Records bought and creatives kept do not track each other in this category. The biggest spender is also the top survivor, but the second biggest threw out its copy in February, and the app holding third place on the board got there on 923 records against PlantIn's 1,516.
Where these apps buy
This category is App Store search results almost end to end. Plant Parent shows 767 search-results placements and zero product-page placements. Botan shows 866 search, zero product page. PlantIn shows 1,243 search, zero product page. That is intent buying: somebody types "plant identifier" or "why is my plant dying" and the ad meets a decision that has already formed.
Two apps buy anything else, and they sit at opposite ends of the volume range. PictureThis ran 801 search placements against 93 product-page placements in the records we retrieved (894 analyzed). Plantum ran 133 search against 25 product page, on a much smaller base. PictureThis is the one making product-page placement last: its English "Plant care and identification" line has been running there in Belgium and Ireland since 1 January 2026, 202 days at the window close. Plantum's product-page creatives were last recorded on 28 July 2025.
What the winning copy says
Every survivor names the plant and the action, in the local verb, and stops.
The German pattern is one word. "Bäume und Blätter Bestimmen" (Botan, past the one-year window). "Bäume und Blumen bestimmen" (Blossom, past the one-year window). "Diagnose und Erinnerungen" (Plant Parent, 332 days). Italian does the same job with a different verb: "Riconoscere Fiori e Alberi" (Botan, past the window) and "Identificare la pianta" (PictureThis, 199 days). Dutch: "Identificatie Bloemen en Bomen" (Botan) and "Identificeer bloemen en bomen" (PictureThis, 199 days). French: "Reconnaitre les Plantes,Fleurs" (Botan) and "Identification de la plante" (PictureThis, 199 days).
The pattern is not about plants. Picture Insect, from Next Vision Limited, sells the same camera behaviour pointed at bugs, and five of its creatives sit past Apple's one-year window with all five still recorded on 22 July 2026: "Insekten und Spinnen bestimmen", "Riconoscere insetti dalle foto", "Insectes, araignées Identifier", "Insect, spinnen Identificatie", "Identification & Pest Control". Name the object, name what happens to it.
Two survivors break the rule and both are worth watching. Plant Parent's Portuguese line, "As melhores dicas", means "the best tips" and is not a translation of its English feature list at all. It has run 340 days, longer than any of Plant Parent's dated creatives. And Planta's only live line is an English slogan running in the German and Austrian storefronts, "Happy Life, Happy Plants!", at 239 days. Neither says what the app does. Both keep running.
Then there is the app that never localizes anything. Plant Care Tracker Ploi runs en-GB copy in Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Portugal, without exception. Its year-plus creative was the two-word headline "Plant Care" across 17 countries, and it went off in January 2026. Its replacement, "Water Reminder & Journal", is at 106 days across 16 countries and is the oldest thing Ploi still has live. Two other Ploi lines died at 59 and 22 days.
The new entrants
Three apps started advertising in this category in the last few months. Two of them are already gone.
AI Plant Doctor, a solo developer, launched 17 creatives with localized copy in eight language tags at once (German, Dutch, English, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, French, Spanish) between 8 and 13 April 2026. Every one of them stopped by 4 May. The longest lived 26 days. Plantoto, also a solo developer, bought 17 records across three storefronts: its German line "Blumen, Beet & Garten pflegen" ran 37 days and stopped on 4 July, and its French line lasted 8 days.
PlantAID is the exception. It started in June 2026 and was still live at the window close, with Italian and Spanish lines ("Diagnosi, Promemoria e Cura" and "Diagnóstico & Recordatorios") both at 48 days since 4 June. It also shows the smallest edit on this board: after 26 days it replaced its German headline "Diagnose&Erinnerungen&Plan" with "Diagnose & Erinnerungen & Plan", the same words with spaces added.
PlantScope belongs in this section too, even though it has been running since October. It launched local lines in German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish within three days of each other, 29 to 31 March 2026, and all four were still live on 22 July at 113 to 115 days. The line it dropped was the English catch-all: "Plant Diagnosis & Care Advice", 224 days across 11 countries, off since 3 June. It also added two new creatives in the final week of the window, so it is still moving.
How to read this for your own category
Longevity is the cheapest performance signal you can get on a rival, and Apple publishes it for free. Nobody keeps paying for an ad that loses money, so a creative still live after a year is a creative that converts. Pull your three closest rivals, sort every ad by how long it has run, and write your first creatives against the survivors instead of the newest thing you happened to see.
Check the publisher field while you are in there. Two names at the top of a board can be one company running two products, which changes what the board is telling you: not that a category has two winners, but that one operator has learned the category twice. Watch the gap between records bought and creatives kept, because a rival buying wide with nothing old is telling you it has not found its line yet. Then come back next month. A new long-runner appearing is a rival finding a winner, and a year-plus line going dark is one losing it.
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), swept across all 25 EU storefronts with zero failed country queries, data window ending 23 July 2026. "Days running" is the span from a creative's first to last recorded impression across those markets, and "still running" means the creative was recorded on 22 July 2026, the last full day in the window. "Past Apple's one-year window" is Apple's own marker: it reports creatives older than a year as over a year rather than as a date, so we cannot date those ads more precisely than Apple does. A "creative" is one distinct ad grouped by placement, format, headline and asset count. Record counts are repository records across the 25-storefront sweep, a proxy for volume, not euros. Longevity is a proxy for performance, not a measured conversion rate. Publishers were confirmed through the iTunes lookup API. Refreshed monthly.