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App Store review times (edit: ballooning due to vibe coded apps)
So if you've submitted an app, you'll have seen this...
Is it just me, or have review times really taken a hit of late?
I'm seeing more like 3-5 days turnaround. I'm guessing that "48 hours" is a hardcoded string somewhere... tut, tut... 
Anyhoo, just curious what other folks are seeing.
Comments
Well, this is interesting...
AI-powered “vibe coding” tools have driven an 84% jump in new app submissions to Apple’s App Store in a single quarter, according to reporting by The Information, the largest surge in a decade. The flood is straining Apple’s review infrastructure, with approval times ballooning from 24 hours to as many as 30 days.
According to reporting by The Information, the number of new apps submitted to the App Store rose 84% in a single quarter as vibe coding went mainstream. The figure corroborates broader data from Sensor Tower, which tracked a 56% year-on-year spike in iOS app launches in December 2025 and a 54.8% rise in January 2026, the highest growth rates in four years. Apple’s full-year 2025 total reached 557,000 new app submissions, the largest annual wave since 2016.
Full article:
https://thenextweb.com/news/vibe-coding-apple-app-store-surge-crackdown
Damn, AI strangling corporations with legit 4d chess
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/7cg1MXYPIEU
I'm kinda surprised / disappointed Apple didn't see this coming, and scale-up their review infrastructure.
On a personal level, I didn't see it coming at all, and it threw me a financial curved wrecking ball due to forecasting I had made on the "normal" App Store review lead times.
Of course, my perceived "anti-vibe" stance is purely from a technical perspective you understand.
We should all quit and apply to be part of Apple's review team. Yeah this is terrible, because they already let so much dodgy stuff pass through the AppStore, even at the best of times. Now, if they're understaffed, they'll likely check even less carefully - just when checking carefully is more necessary than ever!
@Gavinski if you were on the review team, I would be delighted and nervous as hell in equal measure given the um... "fun and games" earlier
Context: Gav managed to find quite an odd ANALOGy8 bug (*)
(*) Fix submitted and will be in next update, subject to App Store review ti... oh, snap.
We need an ai to monitor/review ai - it's an ouroboros. Maybe one day it will decide to only allow AI apps approval. Kek
Ironically I sometimes wish Apple would use some kind of machine learning on the review rejection criteria.
I, and several of my music app dev buddies have had the rejection that goes something like this:
App Store Review: You have the background audio entitlement enabled, but your app does not play audio in the background... REJECTED!
Developer: This is a virtual instrument. Have you tried playing it? It should play audio in the foreground and background. I'll re-submit the exact same build.
App Store Review: APPROVED!
I've had this one 5 or 6 times over the years. There are other similar ones, where you end up having to explain what an AU App Extension is.
But here's the rub... Even if you get rejected "in error" like this, you still have to re-submit, and, I suspect, back to the back of the queue you go. So imagine you get knocked back twice, due to the reviewer not understanding audio apps and each time that stalls you for 5-10 days due to increased review times...
Every party of signing up for the developer process has taken twice as long as advertised. I’m admittedly in the wave of new AI assisted devs, so signing up for a paid dev license, getting approved, getting initial test flight approvals, and any builds I’ve submitted really have been a matter of taking the advertised time window and multiplying it by 2.
I guess if I’m part of the problem if you look at it as 100% a problem. I’m excited to keep working on making apps out of ideas I’ve had for ages. I actually ordered a new MacBook Pro so I can start talking app dev more seriously (amongst other things, but it was a consideration).
I’ll say, I don’t Apple wants to really “weed out” low effort apps to tightly. They’re making bank off these devices licenses, and they’re trying to bake AI into Xcode as much as they can it seems.
Totally get you @FizzyLizzy27 and I wish you all the best with your adventures!
Bottom line is, if Apple had been prepared for App Store submissions close to doubling, we'd all be happy, right?
And I wouldn't have been living on beans on toast all month...
For sure. Like you said, you’d think there’d be more automation somewhere in the process to make things smoother for everyone.
I’m hoping things smooth out after this initial wave of new devs. It’s interesting coming into the fold in this way. I think you kind of found the trend of “micro-apps” before this wave of AI assisted apps. There’s nothing micro about your apps in the sense of them being small feats, but that they’re really focused on utility and fleshing out a toolkit. Not sure if there’s any useful insight there, but I’m a big @Rob_Jackson_Music fan so I tend to look at what I have from you and other active developers before looking at alternatives from less established devs.
I’m kind of rambling and that’s because I’m not sure how to feel about all of it. You’re going to have ideas that are uniquely yours, and you talk a lot about your “under the hood” tweaks to optimize sound and performance. I also see you asking technical questions about code implementation, which is awesome. If those questions are asked to people who rely on AI, hopefully that will get them to look under the hood of what’s being made.
Rather than scale up I imagine they will make changes to the submission process / guideless to more quickly weed out low hanging unripe fruit.
i think this "vibecoded" boom will fade out in next few months.. now everybody who did not wrote single line of code in their entire lie wants to make own app to flex before frends - but 99% of those people then realise they are able produce just generic uninteresting sub-average AI slop who is nobody except of few their friends interested to use and they loose interest and jump on next "trend" thing which pops up .. Probably some funny dance on TikTok
And Apple will adjust their rules to avoid spamming Appstore by sub-avera AI slop trash..
It just needs some time to settle down. IT will be good in mid/long term.
I suspect / hope they might do both.
Even if just the submission process includes a declaration that AI code generation tools have been used.
You may know that just last month Apple Music:
introduced "Transparency Tags" to identify and label AI-generated content on its platform. This initiative requires record labels and distributors to disclose if artificial intelligence was used to create a "material portion" of a song, its lyrics, accompanying artwork, or music videos.
Personally, I think something similar needs to happen on the App Store. Regardless of whether the content is "good" or "bad", it seems Apple is taking the view that consumers have the right to know, at least when it comes to Apple Music.
Will Apple take the view the same should apply to the App Store? I guess time will tell...
I also think it's dangerous to fall into the trap of thinking AI app = bad or "slop" app. That's certainly not what I'm saying. Sure, I have reservations about using it from a technical perspective, but that's not the point here. I'm sure it's just as likely that AI can be used to build an amazing app, as it is for a real person to develop a terrible one.
To @dendy's point, maybe it will tail-off as you say, but do we know it's even peaked yet?
Like I say, I think the infrastructure needs to change to handle the increased demand. Even if it's just a realistic estimate for review turnaround instead of that hardcoded "48 hours" string. And secondly, something akin to "Transparency Tags" would be welcome, at least from my perspective.
PS. Anyone got an email address for Ricky Tinez?
That’s what I’m thinking. It’s not cheap to have a Mac, dev license, and AI subscriptions. People who make good stuff or are making passion projects will stick around and hopefully add value as opposed to overly diluting the market.
Exactly. Most of the buggy, unoriginal, ugly ui apps will sell very poorly.
Drop Forge has exited the chat
Well, withdrawing from the AppStore after a few days is definitely a great way to limit sales. Including future sales of any new apps you bring out, yep...
DropForgeGate
Hahahaha No Mercy Gav! They call him the Gavel in some sectors
I only trust devs with a good coding background and knowledge of music, whether they're assisted by ai or not. I don't want an app where Claude thinks dividing by zero is a creative process, nor do I want to explain it to a crowd, lol.
(Edit : I have no animosity towards vibe-coders)
I absolutely despise LLMs. I miss when machine learning meant predicting a house price or detecting cancer.
To address the main topic - I've recently submitted my first app to Testflight. It took maybe 3 days to get approved initially and now updates are auto-approved instantly. Maybe the original complaint affects store releases more? I'm not there yet, but I've had no long wait problems personally.
To address the other elephant in the room; yes it's "vibe coded", if that instantly turns you off that's fine but you're blindly dismissing that; I'm not a child, (I'm in my mid 40s), I've been playing music since I was 8, I've been a professional creative 'generalist' for my entire life, my domain knowledge is multi-faceted. I've used 100s of iOS apps, many of which I've wished 'if only it did this', sometimes had ideas no one has attempted at all (maybe now they will, and if they do a good job then great, it saves me doing it myself). I've always openly approached devs with ideas on how I think they could improve but ultimately it's totally down to them if they agree or not/do anything about it. I could wait my entire life for a fix or feature that may never come, so I've often written Mozaic scripts to create things I needed that don't already exist (I have 24 patches on patchstorage) rather than wait for a dev to do my bidding. Actually the lack of DIY get up and go in the space is kind of astounding, especially when there's tools like Mozaic out there - people would rather complain or bother a dev than do something about it. AI opens this further, and the gap will get wider. I believe I have a unique perspective, original ideas, but I wouldn't insult developers by calling myself one.
I KNOW what I want, I know how it should feel, and I know what BAD looks and feels like, AI has expertise it would take me decades to learn, why should I when I can do it now? Slop isn't an AI problem it's an imagination problem, a patience problem, a communication problem. It's reductive to assume anything made with AI is slop by definition. Unfortunately (?), the world is not and will never be the same as it was before AI came along, in both wonderful and terrible ways. Empowering people to build their creative vision is not the worst thing I can think of.
Pretty much anyone can get a driving license, and that makes the roads more congested. You can shake your fist at the traffic all you like but if you pick an alternative route you are more likely to enjoy the journey.
Very much this ^^
Unless their creative vision is for evil eh? 😎
I'm just pulling your chain. (Well, kinda. It is actually a valid thing to fear.)
I'm not against vibe coding in any sense anymore. I see it no differently than if someone with creative initiative but lacking the time and skills to do it themselves had the wherewithal to hire someone to do it for them. One can hire contractors that present themselves well but produce slop too. Try discovering a year into a six-figure project that those expensive contractors that promised the world were idiots. Sigh. I've done that in my IT career. Not fun.
AI has lowered the risk factor to just about nothing. If that enables people with great ideas to get shit done, I'm all for it.
If you haven't already, consider why that might be true.
IMHO, it's mostly determined by who's in the driving seat, right?
To create software, you need a fairly well established model of what it is you're trying to do. Then the components of that model get turned into code.
And in my experience, the more thought-through and evolved this model is, the easier it is to turn it into code.
And I think that applies 100% whether you're coding on you're own, working in a huge team, or prompting Claude.
Perhaps ironically in the context of this debate, I actually find writing the code is easily the easiest part of what I do. I like to think that's because I've already solved most of the hard problems in my head (or on previous projects) before I write a single line of code. Those challenges have been addressed in my model, if you like.
I've also found that fixing problems in code resulting from a "bad" or "sketchy" model, is much more "expensive" than tackling these challenges up-front in a model. aka Technical debt...
Where I see (or hear of...) vibe coding working successfully in projects, it's when the relationship between the prompter and the AI agent is like the relationship between a senior and junior developer, and when the senior developer (actual human) is good at "doing" software models.
Where I see (or hear of...) vibe coding failing, it's when that relationship looks more like it's the other way around...
Finally, my personal perspective on this, I would ask any vibe coder:
If the answer to any of these questions is "no", then I have concerns.
I really appreciate your balanced responses guys!
I hope I didn't come off too defensive or 'me me me' but was trying to point out that there ARE people like me probably trying to enter the space (as well as a lot of 'slop' no doubt). It's a nuanced conversation, not black and white. There's a lot of very un-nuanced hyperbole about this stuff and it's nice to find a place to feel relatively safe to talk about it.
To the (semi joking) 'evil' point: I totally get it, capturing/selling user data, privacy, there are definitely 'evil' use cases that are very much easier to create now, additionally giving them a trusty veneer. Hopefully Apples walled garden affords people some kind of protection.
I totally appreciate that I represent a minority in a sea of people entering the space, I'm sure I'm flotsam on a tide of nonsense blissfully unaware of what I'm floating on, I'm just trying to represent for the flotsam fam
I think there's definitely a spectrum of what vibecoding should or shouldn't touch - peoples data/payment is not something you should trifle with without proper understanding (again, this is where Apples walled garden can give you an safer entryway to receiving payment without any data safety concerns, since they handle all that stuff)
I agree with most of your points Rob, regarding experience and vision. Though I think going in with everything solved isn't always necessary. I see it similar to making music, sure maybe I have an idea, but maybe I just need to make one sound before it starts to take me somewhere - starting often leads to a more exciting tangent, as with making apps - it's exciting not to entirely rely on your pre-existing knowledge. Just do it within reasonable boundaries and I don't really have an issue with it.
I think the concerns checklist isn't black and white, in my eyes at least - to be completely honest the answer to 3 and 4 for me are no. I think whether 3 & 4 are really a concern very much depends on context. In my experience so far, the AI is getting better all the time, as long as you can give it the right information, or ask the right questions - even go into enough detail to the problem, it CAN fix things FAST. I'm not building tools that will cause harm if there's a bug, or lose peoples data, or whatever.
Define 'getting stuck' or 'screwing up' - sure maybe some things take you down a dark alley and maybe it's better to ditch an idea than duck-tape it together, but if you look at Xcode and, i.e. see that your app is idling at 30% CPU, you know there's a problem and have a metric to judge whether it's fixed or not, or find out why at least. Not touching the code means if it works, and if there's no crazy side-effects, it's probably good enough without needing to read or understand anything, in many contexts at least. If things truly fall apart - abandon ship and move on to the next idea, is my philosophy. It's how you quickly learn what might and might not work.
Ok, so it has been a very long time since I submitted an app for review, but I remember 1 to 2 weeks was the norm. So surprised to hear 24 hours was the recent norm before a-eyegedden.
There's literally a screenshot ^^ that says up to 48 hours, and yes, that was the norm until recent months.
I've seen numerous v1.0 submissions approved in < 12 hours prior to that.
This is the first time in 10 years I've seen an app take more than 5 days to be approved.
Just checked when I was last doing the iOS app submission thing, it was 2014, and 7 to 14 days was not unexpected, especially for a v1.0 submission.
my AudioPipeline app got approved like in less than 24 hours .. twice cause during first approval i found bug so just ager i got approval i directly submtieed new build - that one was approved even sooner, probably afet 12 hours .. so can't complain ..
Approvals for new version in TestFlight are even faster, usually 4-5 hours max (new build within same version is almost instant)
Congrats on your first release, Marek!