Apple says App Review is still fast. Developers posting online say brand-new apps sit for weeks. Both claims can look true at once — if you notice what Apple’s averages quietly leave out.
On paper, Cupertino still repeats the same target: App Review works around the clock, with at least half of submissions reviewed in under 24 hours and 90 percent in under 48. When press outlets asked about rising queues in 2026, an Apple spokesperson denied that review times were getting longer. The company said it was processing more than 200,000 submissions a week, with an average of about 1.5 days, and that it was increasingly using AI to assist human reviewers. Later, when The Register pressed again on multi-week waits, Apple’s line was warmth without numbers: developers are building more apps, the review process is “evolving,” and every app is held to the same standards for quality, privacy, and security.
That is the official clock. The other clock lives on Apple’s developer forums, on Reddit, on Mastodon, and in developer blogs. There the stories are not “everything is fine.” They are “Waiting for Review” for ten days, seventeen days, a month. New apps with no review history. Launch dates that slip. Preorders that pass with the binary still unopened. Marco Arment’s Unforgetful sat long enough that a planned preorder date blew past while the submission waited — and he said so in public.
Why both stories can be true
Apple’s published goals do not separate a first-time app from the thousandth update of an old one. Updates with minor changes and bug fixes, Apple’s own help pages note, typically move quickly. Most of what hits the queue every day is exactly that: another build of something already on the store.
So the average can stay near a day and a half while brand-new apps wait much longer. Developers who track their own submissions describe the split clearly: updates often clear in hours or within a day or two; first submissions cluster in the long tail — ten to fifteen days and more in forum reports through 2026. Apple even lists “limited review history” among the reasons a review may take extra time. The company does not advertise that as the headline. Online, it is the headline.
What is actually stuck
Read the online complaints carefully and a pattern holds better than the panic version of the story. The builds that sit in “Waiting for Review” for weeks are overwhelmingly new apps — first listings, little or no prior review history — not routine version bumps of apps already shipping.
An update that adds support for a new device, fixes a crash, or ships a feature to an existing title usually still moves on Apple’s faster track. That matters for owners waiting on a patch. It also means the real damage of the 2026 queue is not that every Mac or iPhone app suddenly freezes. It is that new software has a harder time arriving at all.
What flooded the queue
Developers and trade press have a blunt name for the volume: vibe-coded and AI-assisted apps. Sensor Tower figures cited in Business Insider showed new iOS apps in the U.S. jumping more than 50 percent year over year at the turn of 2025–2026. Appfigures and The Information reported sharp rises in new App Store apps — The Information put one surge near 84 percent. Apple does not concede that those numbers broke review. It insists the averages hold. It does not publish a separate clock for first submissions.
On the ground, established indie developers describe the unfairness simply: they ship careful updates and still share a human review pipeline with a flood of low-effort first apps. Jeff Johnson has argued that nothing stops a single account from spamming submissions. Apple’s 2025 review volume — more than 9.1 million submissions, by the company’s own count — makes the math feel less abstract.
What users actually feel
If you only use apps you already own, you may barely notice. Updates still land. Bug fixes still ship. The Mac App Store and the iPhone App Store keep looking busy.
If you are waiting for something that does not exist on the Store yet — a new utility, a new indie tool, a first Mac companion to a phone app — you are waiting on the slow clock. Marketing dates slip. Featured placement becomes guesswork. Some Mac developers say they keep a direct download ready because they will not bet a launch solely on review. Phone users have fewer escapes from that gate.
Apple assures the public that standards are unchanged and that most submissions clear quickly. It does not put a plain number on how long a new app should take when the queue is heavy. That gap — between a blended average and a first-time wait — is what the official statements omit and what the online voices keep repeating.
The final question
If Apple can keep saying 48 hours while new apps wait weeks, whose clock is the App Store really running on — the people waiting for something new, or the average that makes the gate look open?