PlantIn buys App Store ads in all 25 EU storefronts. Nobody else in plant identification comes close on coverage: PictureThis is in 18, Plant Parent in 22, Planta in 6. PlantIn did that on 1,516 ad records in the last year, and on 23 distinct creatives.
It also has nothing left with a year of proof behind it. Its one creative that Apple dates past its one-year window was last recorded on 28 July 2025, a year ago this week.
Everything below comes from Apple's public Ad Repository, the transparency dataset the EU Digital Services Act requires. It shows every App Store ad an advertiser ran, where, in what language, and for how long. The repository lists the publisher as Vortemol Limited. Data window ends 23 July 2026.
The one ad with a year behind it is off
The line was "Tree Health scanner・Care App", in English, and it ran in Estonia and Latvia. Apple dates it past the one-year window, so PlantIn had at least twelve months of it running. Last recorded 28 July 2025.
Two things to notice. It was PlantIn's only year-plus creative, and it ran in two of the smallest storefronts on the board. The wide coverage and the durable creative were never the same ad.
Compare the two apps above it. Glority Global Group runs PictureThis and Plant Parent as separate products, 2,778 records between them, and each one holds a creative past Apple's one-year window that was still recorded on 22 July 2026. PictureThis keeps "Plant care and identification" running in ten countries. Plant Parent keeps "Identify, Diagnose & Reminders". Neither publisher is in more storefronts than PlantIn. Both have older ads.
Then February happened
On 6 February 2026, two PlantIn creatives started on the same day: a new English line, "Plant Finder & Disease ID App", across 19 countries, and a new German line, "Pflanzen Krankheiten Bestimmen", in Germany and Austria. The German ad they replaced, "Krankheiten・Pilze bestimmen", was last recorded on 7 February after 120 days.
An English variant followed on 11 February in four countries, and Italy got "Piante identificare e curare" on 20 February. So the wide English set, the German set, and Italy all date from a three-week stretch in February. At the window close they were 166, 166, 161 and 152 days old.
That is a clean, deliberate rebuild. It is also a portfolio where almost everything is under six months old, in a category where the two leaders are running ads older than a year.
What survived is Iberian
| Market | Creative | Started | Days running |
|---|---|---|---|
| Portugal | "Identificador de plantas・flora" | 19 Aug 2025 | 334 |
| Spain | "Identificador de flores・setas" | 19 Sep 2025 | 306 |
| France | "ID Plante Malade ・ Soigner" | 9 Nov 2025 | 255 |
| 19 countries (English) | "Plant Finder & Disease ID App" | 6 Feb 2026 | 166 |
| Germany, Austria | "Pflanzen Krankheiten Bestimmen" | 6 Feb 2026 | 166 |
| Italy | "Piante identificare e curare" | 20 Feb 2026 | 152 |
PlantIn's two oldest live ads are Portuguese and Spanish, at 334 and 306 days, in single storefronts. France, at 255 days, is the other line that predates February. Everything wide is new.
Portugal is the same market that holds the oldest surviving line for Plant Parent, "As melhores dicas" at 340 days, and one of the two oldest for PictureThis, at 304 days. Three separate advertisers, and the ad each one leaves alone longest is Portuguese.
A keyword it dropped in Germany is still earning in Spain
The German ad PlantIn retired in February sold two things, diseases and mushrooms ("Krankheiten・Pilze bestimmen"). The replacement sells one, plant diseases. Meanwhile the Spanish line still running at 306 days is "Identificador de flores・setas", flower and mushroom identifier. The angle it stopped buying in one market is the angle in its second-oldest surviving ad.
The copy style moved too. The older lines all use a middle dot to stack two keyword phrases into 30 characters, which is what you do when you are writing for search matching. The February set reads like plain phrases instead. Whether that was a positioning call or a new person writing the ads, the data does not say. It does say the dot-stacked lines are the ones that lasted.
Search results only, no product page
Placement is one-sided. In the records we analyzed placement for, 1,243 were App Store search results and none were product page. PlantIn buys people who already typed "plant identifier" or "plant disease" and buys nothing on a rival's product page.
Two apps in the category do buy product page: PictureThis (93 records) and Plantum (25). PictureThis has been holding a product-page creative in Belgium and Ireland since 1 January. So the category leader is doing something PlantIn is not, at small volume, for over 200 days.
What a founder can take from this
- Coverage is the easy number to win, and it proves nothing. PlantIn is in every EU storefront and its longest-lived ad ran in Estonia and Latvia and is switched off. Track how long your creatives survive before you track how many markets they reach.
- Rebuild one market at a time. PlantIn restarted English and German on the same day and left Iberian alone. Iberian is now the oldest thing it owns. If you replace a whole set at once you also delete the baseline you would have measured the new set against.
- Read the retirements, not the launches. The two readable events here are a shutoff (28 July 2025) and a swap (7 February 2026). One pull tells you what a rival is running today. Pulling monthly tells you what they gave up on, which is the part they will never post about.
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, data window ending 23 July 2026. "Days running" is the span from a creative's first to last recorded impression across those markets. The Spanish, French, English, German and Italian lines above were recorded on 22 July 2026; the Portuguese line was last recorded on 19 July 2026. Apple reports creatives older than its one-year window as over a year rather than a date, which is Apple's own marker, not ours. Record counts are repository records across those 25 storefronts, a proxy for volume, not euros and not spend. Longevity is a proxy for performance, not a measured conversion rate.