How many VS Code extensions are abandoned?

In this August 2026 sample, 65.2% had not been updated since 2025-08-08. Their median install count (1,350) is higher than that of actively-updated extensions (103), because staleness and age select the same population and installs are cumulative.

← VS Code Marketplace data

How much of the VS Code Marketplace is abandoned?

65.2% of measured extensions have not been updated in twelve months — and the stale ones have a higher median install count than the current ones. By category, with the age confound stated.

Read this before quoting anythingThis is not a census and it is head-biased: each category was paged from the most-installed downwards until a cap, so the tail below the cap is missing. Every “under N installs” figure here is therefore a floor, not an estimate — the true share is higher, because everything the crawl did not reach lies below everything it did.

65.2% of the extensions in this sample have not been updated since 2025-08-08. The surprise is which ones: the stale set has a median of 1,350 installs and the actively-updated set has 103. The abandoned half of this marketplace is the bigger half.

Because “stale” and “old” are the same population

An extension that shipped in 2018 and stopped in 2021 has had years to accumulate installs; one published last month is fresh by construction and has had none. Sorting on last-updated therefore sorts, mostly, on age — and age is what drives a cumulative counter. Read the two medians as a warning about the split rather than as a finding about maintenance.

What the split does support: a large install count on the VS Code Marketplace is not evidence that anybody is still maintaining the thing. 65.2% of what is installed from here has not been touched in a year.

By category

Category	Sampled	Not updated in 12 months	Median installs, stale	Median installs, current
Other	11,996	83.6%	3,158	3,097
Themes	11,633	88.5%	1,070	632
Programming Languages	8,991	75.5%	1,686	3,232
Snippets	7,978	77.1%	556	22
Linters	3,903	26.6%	587	24
Extension Packs	3,569	83.9%	322	107
Visualization	3,115	20.4%	592	45
Formatters	2,875	50.9%	819	100
AI	2,040	13.8%	129	31
Debuggers	1,817	39.2%	1,885	168
Machine Learning	1,628	15.4%	265	29
SCM Providers	1,365	17.8%	471	21
Testing	878	28.0%	570	40
Education	850	24.8%	210	24
Data Science	765	19.1%	690	86
Keymaps	488	68.0%	472	53
Notebooks	252	36.5%	410	23
Language Packs	200	51.5%	424	140
Chat	121	4.1%	48	51

All of it, free. One JSONL row per extension, the same data as CSV, the machine-readable summary, the crawler that produced them and the list of rows withheld because their publisher id has the shape of a credential. CC BY 4.0, DOI-archived, no signup and no email. extensions.jsonl extensions.csv the repository

The rest of this dataset

Do star ratings predict how many people install an extension?They point the wrong way. Five-star extensions have a lower median install count than three-star ones, and the reason matters.
How many installs does a new VS Code extension actually get?By release-year cohort, with the age confound stated rather than hidden.
The most-installed VS Code extensionsThe top 250 in this sample, with publisher, category and last-updated date.
How many VS Code extensions and publishers are there?What this crawl found, what it could not reach, and why the difference matters.
Is it worth publishing a VS Code extension?The base rate a new publisher is actually competing against, stated plainly.
Does publishing more extensions help?Median best-extension installs by how many a publisher has shipped.
VS Code Marketplace statistics, measuredEvery headline figure in one place, each one recomputable from the published data.