App Store's 45-Day Wait Is Gone, But H1 Added 560,000 Apps

Top/Articles/App Store's 45-Day Wait Is Gone, But H1 Added 560,000 Apps

NewsPublished March 30, 2026Last updated Aug. 18, 2026

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Key takeaways

App Store reviews are in crisis. What normally takes under 24 hours now takes up to 45 days. Vibe coding drove a 24% surge in submissions, and Apple remains silent.

In March 2026, App Store review went into crisis. Reviews that normally take under 24 hours were taking up to 45 days. Apps piled up in "Waiting for Review" limbo for over a month.

The cause: the explosive rise of "vibe coding" — building apps by simply talking to AI. Now that anyone can create an app, submissions have flooded the App Store and overwhelmed the review system. At that point, Apple had remained officially silent.

What follows is the record as of publication on March 30, 2026. The "up to 45 days" wait was a first-half-of-2026 phenomenon, and it has cleared as of August. The current picture is in the update section below.

[Update, August 17, 2026] The wait is back to normal. The problem simply changed shape

Roughly five months have passed, and the premise of this article — "up to 45 days" — no longer holds. As of August 2026, review waits are back to a matter of hours to a few days. But a shorter queue does not mean the problem this article described has been settled. The pipe was cleared; the volume of water flowing into it has only grown. Here is the picture, point by point.

1. Measured wait times are back to hours or days

Runway, a U.S. company that sells tooling for managing app release workflows, publishes "Live App Store and TestFlight review times," which aggregates observed submission-to-approval times. As of the data update on August 12, 2026, the numbers look like this.

Period / metric	Wait	Who measured it
H1 2026 (this article's first edition)	Up to 45 days / reports of 7–30+ days	Individual developer reports (Apple Community and others)
August 2026 Waiting for Review	14 hr 29 min average	Runway (trimmed mean of observed data)
August 2026 same, range	44 min – 6 days 21 hr	Runway
August 2026 In Review	1 hr 31 min average	Runway
By weekday (fastest / slowest)	Wed 6 hr 8 min / Mon 13 hr 41 min	Runway
Apple's figures (July 2026)	90% within 48 hours / about 1.5 days average	Apple (statement to media)

These numbers are not the same as "what every developer feels." Runway's aggregate comes from teams that use its tooling, and it uses a trimmed mean (an average taken after discarding the largest and smallest outliers). Teams that adopt release tooling skew toward relatively mature engineering organizations, and by the nature of a trimmed mean, the long tail — the handful of submissions stuck for weeks — barely shows up in the figure. Read it with that sample bias (a skew introduced by how, and on whom, the measurement is taken) in mind.

Indeed, the Apple Developer Forums still carried reports of stuck submissions in August 2026: one posted on August 4 was still in "Waiting for Review" as of August 12, and another reported roughly a 10-day wait after submitting on August 1. The median has recovered; the outliers have not disappeared. That is the precise way to state it as of August.

2. Apple says it reviews 90% within 48 hours

The first edition's line that "Apple has remained officially silent" needs updating. In July 2026, Apple gave figures to Business Insider, the U.S. business news outlet (as reported by The Apple Post). Three points: 90% of App Store submissions are reviewed within 48 hours; over the past three months it has processed more than 200,000 submissions per week; and the average review time is about 1.5 days. It is not a straightforward acknowledgment of the delays, but the silence is at least broken.

The figure worth pausing on is the throughput: more than 200,000 submissions a week. Whether that counts only new apps or also updates to existing ones cannot be determined from Apple's statement. Either way, it conveys the sheer volume the review process absorbs.

3. New apps in H1 2026 nearly matched all of 2025

The queue got shorter. The number of apps joining that queue did not — quite the opposite. According to 9to5Mac on July 20, 2026 (citing The New York Times, which drew on data from Sensor Tower, a firm that researches and sells app market data), roughly 560,000 new apps were added to the App Store in the first half of 2026 alone — nearly matching the roughly 600,000 added across all of 2025. That is about double the same period a year earlier.

The "557,000 in 2025" figure in the body of this article comes from Appfigures, which analyzes app revenue and ranking data, and it uses a different methodology and definition than Sensor Tower's ~600,000. Do not subtract one from the other. The direction, though, agrees across both. A separate Appfigures tally found that global app releases in Q1 2026 rose 60% year over year, and 80% for the iOS App Store alone.

4. Downloads grew 2%. Only the supply is growing

Set that against the demand side and the heaviest fact of these five months appears. From the same Sensor Tower data, downloads in H1 2026 came to 17.6 billion, up just 2% year over year. New apps roughly doubled; downloads were flat. Only the number of apps being made is going up. The number being used is not.

A 45-day review wait was a problem developers could feel directly. That is why it caused an uproar, and why it got fixed. Oversupply does not announce itself through any single person's pain. It shows up slowly: near-identical apps filling search results, carefully built apps sinking out of view, downloads per app thinning out. The review backlog clearing and the App Store's problem being solved are two different things.

5. Apple's answer targets "indistinguishable" apps, not AI by name

Apple's move is on the record. On June 9, 2026, App Store Review Guideline 4.3(b) was revised (9to5Mac's report / the guidelines themselves). The revision bars apps that are indistinguishable from what is already widely available, along with "bandwagon variants" of existing categories. It names dating, flashlight, sound-effect, wallpaper, timer, and horoscope apps specifically, stating that these will be rejected without "meaningful differentiation or an improved experience." Guidelines 1.2 (user-generated content) and 4.5.3 were revised at the same time.

This is easy to misread, so to be clear: the revision is not a rule that targets AI-generated apps by name. What the text targets is low quality and duplication; it says nothing about how the app was built. The effect on AI-mass-produced lookalikes is indirect. And Apple Developer News carried no new announcement about review capacity or AI-generated app rules between June and August 2026.

So what these five months delivered is a cleared queue and one more filter at the gate — not an answer to oversupply itself. The situation where an app can be built just by instructing an AI continues, and 560,000 apps in six months is what that looks like. The question this article closed with — how long can "one human reviewer per app" last — is still open, even with the wait times back to normal.

How Bad Is the Delay?

The numbers tell the story. What follows reflects the situation as of March 2026 (for measured figures as of August, see the update section above).

Platform	Normal Review Time	Review Time, March 2026
iOS	24–48 hours	7–30+ days
macOS	1–2 days	5–10+ days
tvOS	About 1 day	Relatively short

The Apple Developer Forums are filled with desperate threads. Titles like "Long delays in App Review" and "App stuck in Waiting for Review" have appeared at least six times since February 2026.

The worst case: a developer posted on Apple Community that they submitted an app on December 12, 2025, and it was still in "Waiting for Review" as of January 26, 2026 — 45 days later.

The inconsistency is extreme. According to developer Michael Tsai's blog, one macOS app waited 10 days, got rejected, then was approved in 20 minutes on resubmission. Developers are left guessing.

Why Is This Happening? The "Vibe Coding" Wave

The direct cause is a surge in App Store submissions.

"Vibe coding" refers to building apps by simply talking to AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Cursor. You describe what you want, and the AI writes the code. No programming knowledge needed — if you have an idea, you can build an app.

The result: App Store submissions have skyrocketed.

Year	New App Submissions	YoY Change
2016	1 million (all-time high)	—
2023	424,000	Lowest since 2012
2024	448,000	+5.7%
2025	557,000	+24%

According to AppFigures data, 2025 saw 557,000 submissions — a 24% year-over-year increase and the largest jump since the 2016 peak. That's an average of 1,865 new apps released every day.

Former Tesla AI lead Andrej Karpathy posted that he "vibe coded a whole iOS app in Swift without having programmed in Swift before" in about an hour. The fact that people with no programming experience can now build apps has inspired a wave of new creators.

What Do AI-Made Apps Look Like?

Currently, 27.1% of all apps on the App Store include AI features. That's more than 1 in 4.

According to 9to5Mac, AI apps generated roughly $900 million in App Store revenue in 2025, with ChatGPT-related apps accounting for about 75%.

But quality is a growing concern. Some people are building serious products, while others are mass-submitting low-quality apps generated entirely by AI. This mix of quality and junk is flooding the review team.

What Is Apple Doing About It?

As of March 2026, Apple had issued no official statement about the review delays. (In July 2026 Apple did give figures to the press; see the update section above.)

On the Developer Forums, the only response is individual replies saying "we're looking into it." Developers who called Apple Support were told: "Yes, we're aware. Sorry."

Meanwhile, Apple has taken a different action. On March 18, 2026, it blocked updates for two popular vibe coding apps.

App	Apple's Argument	Impact
Replit	Apps must not execute code that changes functionality	No updates since January Ranking dropped from #1 to #3
Vibecode	App behavior changes outside App Store violate guidelines	Asked to remove app-generation features

Apple's concern is that apps can change their behavior after passing review. Vibe coding apps generate and execute code on the fly based on user instructions, meaning the app can become something entirely different from what was reviewed. For Apple, that renders the review process meaningless.

The irony: Apple is simultaneously adding AI coding tools (OpenAI and Anthropic integration) to Xcode. It's promoting "building apps with AI" while restricting "apps that dynamically change with AI." This contradiction has left developers confused.

What Are Developers Saying?

On the Apple Developer Forums, multiple developers report that delays "started in February and have continued for over a month." Mac developer Spencer Dailey noted that "review times have increased 3–5x."

The developer community has concrete suggestions: "Only have humans review new apps — automate update reviews." "Create a priority review queue for established developers."

How Does This Affect App Users?

You might think this is just a developer problem, but it affects users too.

Delayed reviews mean delayed bug fixes and security updates. If a developer discovers a vulnerability and submits a fix, but that fix sits in review for 30 days, users remain exposed the entire time.

New apps and services also reach the market more slowly. If it takes over a month to get on the App Store, startups may choose to launch on Android first — potentially leaving iPhone users behind.

What Happens to the App Store When Anyone Can Build an App?

Since its 2008 launch, the App Store has operated on a model of "humans reviewing each submission one by one." It has successfully handled hundreds of thousands of submissions per year. But now that AI has dramatically lowered the barrier to creating apps, that model may be reaching its limits.

Even at 557,000 submissions, 2025 is still well below the 2016 peak of 1 million. The issue isn't just volume — it's likely that the quality variance of AI-generated apps is making each review take longer. Gray-area apps that are hard for humans to evaluate are increasing.

Starting in April, Apple will require builds using the iOS 26 / Xcode 26 SDK or later. While this is a routine annual update, it could indirectly filter out AI apps built on outdated SDKs.

But the fundamental question remains: how long can the "one human reviewer per app" model survive in an era where anyone can build an app? What comes after Apple's silence? That's what we're all waiting to find out.

What came next — the June 2026 revision of Guideline 4.3(b) and Apple's own July statement — is covered in the update section above.

Revision History

▸March 30, 2026: First edition published, following developer reports of waits reaching 45 days and coverage of the submission surge driven by vibe coding.
▸August 17, 2026: Added a substantial update at the top. Reflected the fact that the article's premise — "up to 45 days" — no longer holds, adding Runway's measured figures (August 2026: Waiting for Review averaging 14 hr 29 min, range 44 min to 6 days 21 hr, In Review averaging 1 hr 31 min; data updated August 12) together with their sample bias, the figures Apple gave Business Insider in July 2026 (90% of submissions reviewed within 48 hours, more than 200,000 submissions processed weekly, roughly 1.5 days on average), the gap between roughly 560,000 new apps in H1 2026 and 17.6 billion downloads (+2%), and the June 9, 2026 revision of Guideline 4.3(b) (including the point that it does not target AI-generated apps by name). Also relabeled "Current Review Time" in the body as "Review Time, March 2026" and time-stamped the line about Apple issuing no official statement.