And this is what happens when your phone is not a general purpose computer that can run any program you wish, either written by you or somebody else. People need to stop rewarding Apple for this behavior, and instead buy devices that support free operating systems. Somewhat ironically, one of the best options is Google's Pixel phones with Graphene, Lineage and other "custom ROMs."
> Somewhat ironically, one of the best options is Google's Pixel phones with Graphene, Lineage and other "custom ROMs."
And people also need to stop thinking in general-purpose computer only to the OS layer. A Pixel is no good to me either for precisely the same reason: it is, based on its feature set, not an (ultramobile) general-purpose computer.
I've been waiting about two weeks for the last review for my app, I got one rejection and that took 20 days. It's a bit of a bummer but there isn't anything I can do about it.
I've got a couple PWAs I deploy off of my tailnet and use on my iPhone and iPad.
I have encountered no issues (using IndexedDB for user data) so far. If you approach database sizes larger than 1GB I believe you might run into quotas.
I have 3 apps on the store that are inconsequential in the scheme of things and reviewers often spend at most 2 minutes on updates. Sometimes longer, but typically the longest part of the process is getting into review. The lack of transparency is genuinely irritating and everyone but Apple and their bottom line would be better served by them applying the gatekeeper security model to iOS.
IOS is such a dream for virtual instruments: Cheaper than desktop versions, portable, plenty of choice. But the web is getting better too. Plenty of excellent music apps there. The App Store is not the future and it feels good.
I'm not sure what Apple can do here; Pandora's box is open and it won't be closed. It felt like there was a flood of app releases in the early 2010s during the gold rush. I can't even imagine it now.
I noticed that Apple has been updating their documentation so developers can have less back and forth when releasing an app.
Apple has anti-spam app policies that basically limit innovation and competition in certain product categories. An extreme example would be Apple not allowing any more "sleep music apps" b/c there is enough in the store.
An investor actually approached me about buying a couple mobile apps I made b/c they are "aged" and don't need to go through the rigorous first-review approval process
A lot, they _can_ do almost whatever they want with their own AppStore and own business model. Including making good on the anti-trust lawsuit they've got for a decade around the world and let go of their monopoly.
We shouldn't make it sound like they _have to be_ the bad guys. Even from a business standpoint they're slowly losing the grip on their market and getting back some goodwill wouldn't be a bad thing.
They will not. Why would high revenue be a reason to hire more?
They look at margins and they want to optimize them, not use better margins as a reason to pursue smaller margins. Small time indie developers and businesses that earn them less than millions a month in fees are not worth their time. They’re solving this by automating more telemetry, not by hiring more junior and senior reviewers. They don’t want to take a loss on small devs.
Hire more reviewers. Apple is making a shitload of money from App Store sales (and of course by scamming its users in many creative ways). They'd better spend it on making developers happier, not on thickening the walls of their garden.
They don’t make a shitload off the small apps like the synthesizer from this post. They aren’t going to introduce more expensive Cupertino and Cork reviewers to help that category of dev. They’re a business and will automate instead of have small time earners occupy more time on reviewer desks.
In both of these cases the platforms are absurdly profitable, 75% profit margin for Apple, fleet of mega-yachts for Steam, the solution is they stop skimping on review and hire more people to keep up.
Have just submitted two new apps last week and they’ve been published 2 days later. Updated them a couple of times this week and that also took around 2 days.
Not sure if it’s because I have a good track record but I only had been rejected a couple of times and even then I just had to submit a screen recording of me playing with the app to make it pass the review process.
Apple and Google are a mobile cartel, they need to be broken up.
This is absurd.
If people want the editorialized 'safety' of an App Store, they can use it, that's fine, but there's no reason to stop people from buying apps for their phone from wherever they want.
I m waiting for weeks to just enroll in their developer program, that i have paid for. Are they deliberately stalling everything to stop people from putting more stuff in the app store? I m going to go ahead and release the android version and make sure to badmouth apple to their users. life is short
I am more interested in the fact so many people are spamming the app store. What are they hoping for actually? If you can write a prompt for it, anyone can do it. There's no value in an app like before. I think those times are over.
Maybe the "democratization" of it will bring in fresh ideas. Maybe not. But anyway basically no one will make any money or have any success off these vibe coded apps.
Tens of millions of people finally have the ability to make apps. So they are.
But for billions of people it's still way too high of friction for now. Especially on mobile and iOS. So they download apps.
There's still success to be had too. Distribution is all that's ever really mattered. If you have money to advertise or authority in some niche... you can get users and customers, no matter the slop.
Most of the new people making apps will learn that the hard way like the rest of us, but some will succeed.
>It was over a month of back-and-forth, so I threw my hands up and released it audio-only for now. What we will do is bundle the MIDI build into the binary so both AUv3s install.
Oh, so they are trying to do a soft bait and switch; where an app developer makes an app, splits its functionality, and sells both on the app store. They hope that someone buys the first app, which is missing basic functionality, not realizing they have to buy a second app to get the additional expected features. Like if you buy a video converter app that doesn't let you convert to an MP4 unless you buy a second "MP4 version" video converter app. Scummy behavior, glad Apple blocked it.
There is a surge of vibe coded apps in the iOS community.
Some of them are good - generally by musicians or sound designers who couldn't code.
Many are utter trash, designed by developers who have barely any musical taste and simply told Claude to make some glitchy reverb pedal or groovebox. They use AI to write the copy for the app store and leave the UI as default (navy with fixed width headers, often looking like more like a spreadsheet than a synth). Sometimes trying to charge as much as $30 for it. It's a scourge but on the upside, most of them have now got their dopamine fix and moved onto something else.
Couldn’t help myself, asked Claude for the most iconic post complaining about developing Apple software every year since iOS came out.
2007 — John Gruber, "WWDC 2007 Keynote News"
This was his reaction to Jobs telling developers to build web apps instead of real ones. Its best-known line: "If all you have to offer is a shit sandwich, just say it."
2008 — Fraser Speirs, "App Store: I'm Out"
The battle lines were drawn when an Apple representative reviewing submissions for the App Store rejected a program called Podcaster for duplicating iTunes. Speirs then vowed never to write another iPhone app for the store "as currently constituted." Runner-up: the anger over the SDK's secrecy agreement (NDA), which Apple dropped in October after admitting it placed "too much of a burden" on iPhone developers.
2009 — Paul Graham, "Apple's Mistake"
Graham wrote that the App Store is an ongoing karma leak. Pair it with Joe Hewitt quitting the Facebook iPhone app the same month: "I am philosophically opposed to the existence of their review process."
2010 — Lee Brimelow (Adobe), "Apple Slaps Developers in the Face"
This was about rule 3.3.1, which banned apps built with cross-platform tools like Flash. Brimelow ended it with: Go screw yourself Apple. (coverage)
2011 — Readability's open letter to Apple
"We believe that your new policy smacks of greed," wrote Rich Ziade, Readability's creator. Apple reversed itself within days. (coverage)
2012 — Marco Arment, "The Mac App Store's future of irrelevance"
His target was the new sandboxing rules: "leaving is often a better option, or the only option, for the affected developers". Runner-up: Wil Shipley's essay arguing the Mac App Store needs paid upgrades.
2013 — Ken Case (Omni Group) on OmniKeyMaster (the weakest year)
Omni tried to offer discounted upgrades to Mac App Store buyers and had to back down: "My apologies: I'm afraid we will not be able to offer upgrade pricing to our Mac App Store customers after all." (coverage)
2014 — Jared Sinclair, "A Candid Look at Unread's First Year"
His sales numbers set off the "indie apocalypse" debate. Runner-up: Apple ordered PCalc's calculator widget removed while featuring it. Apple then backed down possibly due in part to the firestorm of press and social media criticism.
2015 — Bohemian Coding, "Leaving the Mac App Store" (Sketch)
Gruber's verdict on it: "The Mac App Store is rotting, at least for productivity software."
2016 — Bogdan Popescu, "Dash and Apple: My Side of the Story"
Apple shut his developer account. He published a recorded call in which they want me to write a blog post in order to restore my account. One caveat for your article: Apple said the account was linked to almost a thousand fraudulent reviews.
2017 — Matt Gemmell, "Damage"
His thesis: "No company has done as much damage to the perceived value of software, and the sustainability of being an independent developer, as Apple."
2018 — The Developers Union open letter
It asked Apple for free trials for apps and a "more reasonable revenue cut." (coverage)
2019 — Daniel Ek, "Time to Play Fair" (Spotify)
Spotify's CEO compared Apple's rules to inviting you to a match on our ping-pong table and then forcing you to play blindfolded while we change the rules throughout the game.
2020 — DHH's Twitter thread about the Hey email app (archived on hey.com)
"I will burn this house down myself, before I let gangsters like that spin it for spoils." Probably the most famous thread in this whole history.
2021 — Kosta Eleftheriou's thread on scam apps
It opened with "The App Store has a big problem": copycat scam apps were outselling honest developers while Apple took its cut. (coverage)
2022 — Judgment call
The most-seen post was Elon Musk's "Did you know Apple puts a secret 30% tax on everything you buy through their App Store?" (it got quickly tagged by Community Notes). For a working developer's complaint, use Alin Panaitiu's post about being rejected for being "too similar to a website".
2023 — Eric Migicovsky and Beeper Mini
Beeper Mini brought iMessage to Android, and Apple kept blocking it. By late December Beeper gave up, with Canadian CEO Eric Migicovsky writing in a blog post that Beeper "can't win" against Apple.
2024 — Tim Sweeney's thread on the EU rules
Apple's response to the EU's Digital Markets Act was, he wrote, "a devious new instance of Malicious Compliance", with plenty more "hot garbage" in it. (coverage)
2025 — David Smith, "The Forgotten Customer"
"They aren't trying to win me over by being excellent; they are assuming my loyalty through strong-arm tactics and intransigence." Runner-up: the backlash to Apple's Liquid Glass redesign, as in this line collected by Michael Tsai: "Liquid Glass has killed my motivation and desire to develop anything for Apple platforms."
2026 (so far) — Marco Arment on App Review delays
"App Store review delays are back to Shoemaker-era levels." Many blame a flood of AI-generated apps. That makes a neat bookend to 2008, which was also about waiting on App Review. (Mastodon) Runner-up: Jeff Johnson's "Small ways the App Store could be improved for developers".
To me it seems like the core problem here is that Apple has implemented a really crappy AI review process. In particular it seems much dumber than just asking Claude to review an app.
It should be possible to build a review process based on AI that is both faster and more accurate than the 2020-era human-based review process. This isn't rocket science. Are they trying to cheap out by using bad AI models? Or is this some corporate policy where they can only use an "Apple model"? Or do they not have people who are good at developing AI-based workflows?
Hard to say from the outside, but this doesn't seem like some sort of inevitable thing, it just seems like Apple has built a bad process here.
The title is too friendly to Apple. Sure the flood of apps is making their lives harder, but also remember that they choose to force everyone through this and you have to PAY them to do their job this badly.
It's more than that, they choose to do the absolute least they can and pocket immense profits. In 2021 the judge in the Epic case called them out for only having 500 reviewers now it's 2026 and they still only have 500 reviewers.
My last app was a fairly significant update, and took about 80 hours. In the past, this would normally take less than 12.
But I remember when the app would wait over a week for review, so it's still better than Ye Days of Yore.
I'm almost positive that the reason is a tsunami of slopplets. I know a couple people, just in my orbit, that vibe-coded their first iOS apps. One is a seasoned engineer, and his app is pretty good. The other...not so much, but it did get approved (faster than my update).
In a land of commodified apps, the platform has all the power and the dev has none. Like at this point, they could up their cut to 90% of revenue. There would be an outcry and many devs would leave. But in the end getting even 10% of the revenue of an app you whipped together by telling claude to "make an app, no mistakes" is too good to refuse.
Apple's app review process has always been a silly game. I have a music playing app, and every actual screenshot gets rejected in review for "displaying copyrighted content" (album art). And the terms of review say the screenshots must come from the app, not be mockups. So dumb. I have a fake music collection of fake artists and albums that I load to generate screenshots ... colossal waste of time.
A company I'm familiar with had their app rejected for "App does not contain means to delete accounts"
Then all subsequent ones were rejected "Developer provided test account stopped working"
Logs show that the tester used the "delete my account" function..
As the only customer service available is an uncaring LLM, the only solution that worked was to keep the "Delete my account" button in the app, and make it a NOP on the server side.
This is my experience with app review. They’ll flag things as the exact opposite of what they are in reality. It’s like Apple intentionally hired the worst people to randomly gatekeep the App Store.
> you could wait three weeks only to have it rejected. I’m in daily contact with iOS developers. Many have lost their former euphoria; instead, they express disillusionment and doubt that things will ever be the same.
Who has ever released an iOS app and has "former euphoria"? The process been utterly frustrating for many, many years at this point, and it is a running gag among iOS developers how stupid your rejections can get.
Yes, everything is getting hammered seemingly, took me a month to get new account verified on Steamworks, which used to take two weeks. Lots of places face longer review times, some places seem to double-down on automating as much as possible, without really having sufficient rigor for it in reality.
> My app was REJECTED from submission FOUR TIMES in row. Always same reason (eg. my app is “design spam” and “duplicates existing apps” and it is createed using “app generation template services”) as shown bellow in screenshots. Which is obvious nonsense.
You can feel the entitlement across the room from the developer. They seem to be unable to conceive that outside of their bubble there can be a real case of AI spamming that same look and feel, even if they did it by heart.
Looking at his work, it's clearly modelled after Serum (which even the article describes as "a sort of Serum 2 for iOS") so I am not sure why they think this suddenly deserves a white glove service here.
The App Store is also flooded with Synth apps, so regardless of the UI being the trigger here, I would imagine the category itself has been flagged as spammy and now has a higher bar of entry.
If anything I would use this as an opportunity to reskin and try to stand out, they're giving you a blueprint of what will perform better on the algorithm if you avoid that look if you think about it.
I wouldn't describe it as entitlement. I think one of the issues I would have if I was in this situation is that the developer membership is paid for and the service provider (Apple) is actively refusing to let you engage in part of what you did pay for (the ability to publish apps on the App Store). You can bet that Apple won't give you a refund of that membership fee.
They provided reasons and it is within the terms of service of what you paid for, they were also able to appeal, and I suggest you check the app and the reference app to which the claim is being made against.
technically, anyone can grab a copy of source, put their phone into developer mode and install the app too.
But- practically, it's hard.
You only get 4 application slots on devices in dev mode for example and I think they also expire.
I tried creating an internal app for my company and was gobsmacked that I didn't have any sane method to distribute it short of taking full ownership of everyones devices via MDM.
You are of course not allowed to publish "internal" apps to Testflight (or the App Store, but that's more obvious).
“Just try an alt store” is a condescendingly flippant comment - there is near zero market for iOS alt stores and most people in most countries have no access either.
My above comment is not an excuse for design spam. The design spam rule is necessary. Your feedback is not.
Synths have never been a high profit business on iOS. And small earners are not a priority for Apple review. There’s a business case for not being bothered with most indie apps.
To suggest there’s categorically no room for innovation or value add with new synth products is just ignorant though.
There is also near zero market for more Synth Apps at this point so I'm not sure what you want here.
It's like when the App Store started, someone made a Flashlight App and it was cool. We sure had enough of that by now. Now that AI turned everyone into a maker and the bar is lower in a world of abundance, it's only natural that things shift in terms of expectations for distribution.
This is how new markets take shape too, YouTube became so trash that now platforms such as Nebula came out as a business.
I’m genuinely not sure if you’re doing a bit, especially after explicitly calling out the “entitlement” of the development.
Is “we don’t think there’ll be a market for this” a defensible reason to disqualify an app from the App Store? What’s even your point? You are just looking to be argumentative and pretty clearly have no interest in actually discussing this.
I'll take the callout, I did get emotional. Reason being is because I have bought over 20 synth apps and have worked in the music industry. Looking at the app and the way they reacted to not getting approved made me upset.
> You can feel the entitlement across the room from the developer.
Apple felt they were entitled to insert themselves as an all powerful gate keeper in program distribution, the least they could do is not be shit at it.
Is entitlement always a problem? Maybe if apple didn't try their best to hold a monopoly on app distribution for a large percentage of the mobile userbase, developers wouldn't feel frustrated in this regard. Who's apple to decide which apps aren't allowed because they "duplicate existing apps", and how fairly is that even applied? Are calculators allowed on the app store? It seems awfully like they duplicate existing functionality.
First, I am not trusting them at face value. They are building a copycat of Serum and most likely could be doing some level of vibe-coding themselves.
Second, to your point, say we trusted them, it's a chicken or the egg problem. After all the trash entered the space it became flagged and a scale/moderation issue.
I mean they are entitled to it in a way. You pay Apple 99 Dollars a year to be able to distribute your apps on the store. Why should apple care if it is design spam or a duplicate of an existing app? Most of the apps available in the store would check those boxes too.
And this is what happens when your phone is not a general purpose computer that can run any program you wish, either written by you or somebody else. People need to stop rewarding Apple for this behavior, and instead buy devices that support free operating systems. Somewhat ironically, one of the best options is Google's Pixel phones with Graphene, Lineage and other "custom ROMs."
> Somewhat ironically, one of the best options is Google's Pixel phones with Graphene, Lineage and other "custom ROMs."
And people also need to stop thinking in general-purpose computer only to the OS layer. A Pixel is no good to me either for precisely the same reason: it is, based on its feature set, not an (ultramobile) general-purpose computer.
What makes a bootloader-{un,re}lockable pixel not general-purpose?
I was talking about a whole feature set, not just the minimum requirement to clear enshittification by vendor.
Right, what feature do you feel it lacks that prevent it from being general-purpose?
This is apple's fault entirely, not AI's. app store review sucked well before AI.
I've been waiting about two weeks for the last review for my app, I got one rejection and that took 20 days. It's a bit of a bummer but there isn't anything I can do about it.
Depending what your app is, could you consider distributing privately via TestFlight - or even making it a web app?
Doesn't apply to alllll apps - but flagging it in case you hadn't recently looked into it.. web apps can do a lot and don't charge 15%.
> distributing privately via TestFlight
Don't let Apple catch you doing that. Good way to get your account banhammered.
On iOS they can't even reliably persist user data on the device, last time I checked.
It's probably no coincidence that the only allowed browser engine on iOS doesn't provide proper PWA support.
I've got a couple PWAs I deploy off of my tailnet and use on my iPhone and iPad.
I have encountered no issues (using IndexedDB for user data) so far. If you approach database sizes larger than 1GB I believe you might run into quotas.
I have 3 apps on the store that are inconsequential in the scheme of things and reviewers often spend at most 2 minutes on updates. Sometimes longer, but typically the longest part of the process is getting into review. The lack of transparency is genuinely irritating and everyone but Apple and their bottom line would be better served by them applying the gatekeeper security model to iOS.
IOS is such a dream for virtual instruments: Cheaper than desktop versions, portable, plenty of choice. But the web is getting better too. Plenty of excellent music apps there. The App Store is not the future and it feels good.
Would be nice to have a sort of web-vst standard for synths which are simultaneously web pages but integrate properly with DAWs.
I'm not sure what Apple can do here; Pandora's box is open and it won't be closed. It felt like there was a flood of app releases in the early 2010s during the gold rush. I can't even imagine it now.
I noticed that Apple has been updating their documentation so developers can have less back and forth when releasing an app.
Apple has anti-spam app policies that basically limit innovation and competition in certain product categories. An extreme example would be Apple not allowing any more "sleep music apps" b/c there is enough in the store.
An investor actually approached me about buying a couple mobile apps I made b/c they are "aged" and don't need to go through the rigorous first-review approval process
> what Apple can do
A lot, they _can_ do almost whatever they want with their own AppStore and own business model. Including making good on the anti-trust lawsuit they've got for a decade around the world and let go of their monopoly.
We shouldn't make it sound like they _have to be_ the bad guys. Even from a business standpoint they're slowly losing the grip on their market and getting back some goodwill wouldn't be a bad thing.
They can hire more reviewers - they say they only have 500, that's the same number they had in 2020 when the Epic judge called them out for it.
And makes around $10,000,000,000 per year off the app store: https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/08/appfigures-apple-made-over...
They can absolutely afford to hire more.
They will not. Why would high revenue be a reason to hire more?
They look at margins and they want to optimize them, not use better margins as a reason to pursue smaller margins. Small time indie developers and businesses that earn them less than millions a month in fees are not worth their time. They’re solving this by automating more telemetry, not by hiring more junior and senior reviewers. They don’t want to take a loss on small devs.
Only way they change course is via regulations.
Or competition.
Or that more reviewers might lead to more apps which lead to more revenue.
Competition would have to come in the form of regulation given the lack of other options on iOS
Allow third party app stores.
> I'm not sure what Apple can do here;
Hire more reviewers. Apple is making a shitload of money from App Store sales (and of course by scamming its users in many creative ways). They'd better spend it on making developers happier, not on thickening the walls of their garden.
They don’t make a shitload off the small apps like the synthesizer from this post. They aren’t going to introduce more expensive Cupertino and Cork reviewers to help that category of dev. They’re a business and will automate instead of have small time earners occupy more time on reviewer desks.
They are the richest company in the world worth trillions.
You're not sure what they can do?
1) hire more people 2) let people buy apps from wherever they want.
Why do people think rich businesses will spend more? They protect their margins. Companies don’t earn more to spend more of their margin.
Only way to get what we want from Apple is regulation.
I don't think they will spend more. I think they will spend less. The can spend more, is the answer to OP question
it's not just Apple. Steam game review is now taking weeks due to the amount of AI slop being published, whereas before it was 3-5 days.
I'm not sure how platforms will handle this honestly. Of course they want to curate a bit and avoid blatant malware/spam, though.
Even just internal Steamworks requests are taking 3-5x as long.
In both of these cases the platforms are absurdly profitable, 75% profit margin for Apple, fleet of mega-yachts for Steam, the solution is they stop skimping on review and hire more people to keep up.
$1000 application fee would probably thin the herd.
Have just submitted two new apps last week and they’ve been published 2 days later. Updated them a couple of times this week and that also took around 2 days.
Not sure if it’s because I have a good track record but I only had been rejected a couple of times and even then I just had to submit a screen recording of me playing with the app to make it pass the review process.
Apple and Google are a mobile cartel, they need to be broken up.
This is absurd.
If people want the editorialized 'safety' of an App Store, they can use it, that's fine, but there's no reason to stop people from buying apps for their phone from wherever they want.
There are reasons. You just don’t like the reasons.
I m waiting for weeks to just enroll in their developer program, that i have paid for. Are they deliberately stalling everything to stop people from putting more stuff in the app store? I m going to go ahead and release the android version and make sure to badmouth apple to their users. life is short
Similar issue with shopify apps
I am more interested in the fact so many people are spamming the app store. What are they hoping for actually? If you can write a prompt for it, anyone can do it. There's no value in an app like before. I think those times are over.
Maybe the "democratization" of it will bring in fresh ideas. Maybe not. But anyway basically no one will make any money or have any success off these vibe coded apps.
Tens of millions of people finally have the ability to make apps. So they are.
But for billions of people it's still way too high of friction for now. Especially on mobile and iOS. So they download apps.
There's still success to be had too. Distribution is all that's ever really mattered. If you have money to advertise or authority in some niche... you can get users and customers, no matter the slop.
Most of the new people making apps will learn that the hard way like the rest of us, but some will succeed.
>It was over a month of back-and-forth, so I threw my hands up and released it audio-only for now. What we will do is bundle the MIDI build into the binary so both AUv3s install.
Oh, so they are trying to do a soft bait and switch; where an app developer makes an app, splits its functionality, and sells both on the app store. They hope that someone buys the first app, which is missing basic functionality, not realizing they have to buy a second app to get the additional expected features. Like if you buy a video converter app that doesn't let you convert to an MP4 unless you buy a second "MP4 version" video converter app. Scummy behavior, glad Apple blocked it.
Rare Apple W
There is a surge of vibe coded apps in the iOS community.
Some of them are good - generally by musicians or sound designers who couldn't code.
Many are utter trash, designed by developers who have barely any musical taste and simply told Claude to make some glitchy reverb pedal or groovebox. They use AI to write the copy for the app store and leave the UI as default (navy with fixed width headers, often looking like more like a spreadsheet than a synth). Sometimes trying to charge as much as $30 for it. It's a scourge but on the upside, most of them have now got their dopamine fix and moved onto something else.
Couldn’t help myself, asked Claude for the most iconic post complaining about developing Apple software every year since iOS came out.
2007 — John Gruber, "WWDC 2007 Keynote News" This was his reaction to Jobs telling developers to build web apps instead of real ones. Its best-known line: "If all you have to offer is a shit sandwich, just say it."
2008 — Fraser Speirs, "App Store: I'm Out" The battle lines were drawn when an Apple representative reviewing submissions for the App Store rejected a program called Podcaster for duplicating iTunes. Speirs then vowed never to write another iPhone app for the store "as currently constituted." Runner-up: the anger over the SDK's secrecy agreement (NDA), which Apple dropped in October after admitting it placed "too much of a burden" on iPhone developers.
2009 — Paul Graham, "Apple's Mistake" Graham wrote that the App Store is an ongoing karma leak. Pair it with Joe Hewitt quitting the Facebook iPhone app the same month: "I am philosophically opposed to the existence of their review process."
2010 — Lee Brimelow (Adobe), "Apple Slaps Developers in the Face" This was about rule 3.3.1, which banned apps built with cross-platform tools like Flash. Brimelow ended it with: Go screw yourself Apple. (coverage)
2011 — Readability's open letter to Apple "We believe that your new policy smacks of greed," wrote Rich Ziade, Readability's creator. Apple reversed itself within days. (coverage)
2012 — Marco Arment, "The Mac App Store's future of irrelevance" His target was the new sandboxing rules: "leaving is often a better option, or the only option, for the affected developers". Runner-up: Wil Shipley's essay arguing the Mac App Store needs paid upgrades.
2013 — Ken Case (Omni Group) on OmniKeyMaster (the weakest year) Omni tried to offer discounted upgrades to Mac App Store buyers and had to back down: "My apologies: I'm afraid we will not be able to offer upgrade pricing to our Mac App Store customers after all." (coverage)
2014 — Jared Sinclair, "A Candid Look at Unread's First Year" His sales numbers set off the "indie apocalypse" debate. Runner-up: Apple ordered PCalc's calculator widget removed while featuring it. Apple then backed down possibly due in part to the firestorm of press and social media criticism.
2015 — Bohemian Coding, "Leaving the Mac App Store" (Sketch) Gruber's verdict on it: "The Mac App Store is rotting, at least for productivity software."
2016 — Bogdan Popescu, "Dash and Apple: My Side of the Story" Apple shut his developer account. He published a recorded call in which they want me to write a blog post in order to restore my account. One caveat for your article: Apple said the account was linked to almost a thousand fraudulent reviews.
2017 — Matt Gemmell, "Damage" His thesis: "No company has done as much damage to the perceived value of software, and the sustainability of being an independent developer, as Apple."
2018 — The Developers Union open letter It asked Apple for free trials for apps and a "more reasonable revenue cut." (coverage)
2019 — Daniel Ek, "Time to Play Fair" (Spotify) Spotify's CEO compared Apple's rules to inviting you to a match on our ping-pong table and then forcing you to play blindfolded while we change the rules throughout the game.
2020 — DHH's Twitter thread about the Hey email app (archived on hey.com) "I will burn this house down myself, before I let gangsters like that spin it for spoils." Probably the most famous thread in this whole history.
2021 — Kosta Eleftheriou's thread on scam apps It opened with "The App Store has a big problem": copycat scam apps were outselling honest developers while Apple took its cut. (coverage)
2022 — Judgment call The most-seen post was Elon Musk's "Did you know Apple puts a secret 30% tax on everything you buy through their App Store?" (it got quickly tagged by Community Notes). For a working developer's complaint, use Alin Panaitiu's post about being rejected for being "too similar to a website".
2023 — Eric Migicovsky and Beeper Mini Beeper Mini brought iMessage to Android, and Apple kept blocking it. By late December Beeper gave up, with Canadian CEO Eric Migicovsky writing in a blog post that Beeper "can't win" against Apple.
2024 — Tim Sweeney's thread on the EU rules Apple's response to the EU's Digital Markets Act was, he wrote, "a devious new instance of Malicious Compliance", with plenty more "hot garbage" in it. (coverage)
2025 — David Smith, "The Forgotten Customer" "They aren't trying to win me over by being excellent; they are assuming my loyalty through strong-arm tactics and intransigence." Runner-up: the backlash to Apple's Liquid Glass redesign, as in this line collected by Michael Tsai: "Liquid Glass has killed my motivation and desire to develop anything for Apple platforms."
2026 (so far) — Marco Arment on App Review delays "App Store review delays are back to Shoemaker-era levels." Many blame a flood of AI-generated apps. That makes a neat bookend to 2008, which was also about waiting on App Review. (Mastodon) Runner-up: Jeff Johnson's "Small ways the App Store could be improved for developers".
To me it seems like the core problem here is that Apple has implemented a really crappy AI review process. In particular it seems much dumber than just asking Claude to review an app.
It should be possible to build a review process based on AI that is both faster and more accurate than the 2020-era human-based review process. This isn't rocket science. Are they trying to cheap out by using bad AI models? Or is this some corporate policy where they can only use an "Apple model"? Or do they not have people who are good at developing AI-based workflows?
Hard to say from the outside, but this doesn't seem like some sort of inevitable thing, it just seems like Apple has built a bad process here.
The title is too friendly to Apple. Sure the flood of apps is making their lives harder, but also remember that they choose to force everyone through this and you have to PAY them to do their job this badly.
It's more than that, they choose to do the absolute least they can and pocket immense profits. In 2021 the judge in the Epic case called them out for only having 500 reviewers now it's 2026 and they still only have 500 reviewers.
https://apple.com/app-store
> Every week, nearly 500 dedicated experts around the world review over 130K apps.
And they actually updated that in the middle of last year, it's not just something they forgot it used to say:
> Every week, over 500 dedicated experts around the world review over 100K apps.
HN will continue to buy iPhones and licking the boot. Nothing will change.
My last app was a fairly significant update, and took about 80 hours. In the past, this would normally take less than 12.
But I remember when the app would wait over a week for review, so it's still better than Ye Days of Yore.
I'm almost positive that the reason is a tsunami of slopplets. I know a couple people, just in my orbit, that vibe-coded their first iOS apps. One is a seasoned engineer, and his app is pretty good. The other...not so much, but it did get approved (faster than my update).
In a land of commodified apps, the platform has all the power and the dev has none. Like at this point, they could up their cut to 90% of revenue. There would be an outcry and many devs would leave. But in the end getting even 10% of the revenue of an app you whipped together by telling claude to "make an app, no mistakes" is too good to refuse.
This seems fine - and fairly easily fixed with more human reviewers. Maybe they can actually earn the 30% tax now!
I love how poor the writing in this article is. It gives me hope that not everyone has switched to AI.
Apple's app review process has always been a silly game. I have a music playing app, and every actual screenshot gets rejected in review for "displaying copyrighted content" (album art). And the terms of review say the screenshots must come from the app, not be mockups. So dumb. I have a fake music collection of fake artists and albums that I load to generate screenshots ... colossal waste of time.
A company I'm familiar with had their app rejected for "App does not contain means to delete accounts"
Then all subsequent ones were rejected "Developer provided test account stopped working"
Logs show that the tester used the "delete my account" function..
As the only customer service available is an uncaring LLM, the only solution that worked was to keep the "Delete my account" button in the app, and make it a NOP on the server side.
This is my experience with app review. They’ll flag things as the exact opposite of what they are in reality. It’s like Apple intentionally hired the worst people to randomly gatekeep the App Store.
> you could wait three weeks only to have it rejected. I’m in daily contact with iOS developers. Many have lost their former euphoria; instead, they express disillusionment and doubt that things will ever be the same.
Who has ever released an iOS app and has "former euphoria"? The process been utterly frustrating for many, many years at this point, and it is a running gag among iOS developers how stupid your rejections can get.
Yes, everything is getting hammered seemingly, took me a month to get new account verified on Steamworks, which used to take two weeks. Lots of places face longer review times, some places seem to double-down on automating as much as possible, without really having sufficient rigor for it in reality.
> Developing and releasing a VST plugin is simple. You set up a website, upload your installers, set a price, and you’re good to go.
I don't disagree with the critique of Apple's policies, but boy this made me roll my eyes.
But wait, that's not all! There are so many more nightmares in store for you!
> My app was REJECTED from submission FOUR TIMES in row. Always same reason (eg. my app is “design spam” and “duplicates existing apps” and it is createed using “app generation template services”) as shown bellow in screenshots. Which is obvious nonsense.
You can feel the entitlement across the room from the developer. They seem to be unable to conceive that outside of their bubble there can be a real case of AI spamming that same look and feel, even if they did it by heart.
Looking at his work, it's clearly modelled after Serum (which even the article describes as "a sort of Serum 2 for iOS") so I am not sure why they think this suddenly deserves a white glove service here.
The App Store is also flooded with Synth apps, so regardless of the UI being the trigger here, I would imagine the category itself has been flagged as spammy and now has a higher bar of entry.
If anything I would use this as an opportunity to reskin and try to stand out, they're giving you a blueprint of what will perform better on the algorithm if you avoid that look if you think about it.
Or just try an Alt Store.
I wouldn't describe it as entitlement. I think one of the issues I would have if I was in this situation is that the developer membership is paid for and the service provider (Apple) is actively refusing to let you engage in part of what you did pay for (the ability to publish apps on the App Store). You can bet that Apple won't give you a refund of that membership fee.
They provided reasons and it is within the terms of service of what you paid for, they were also able to appeal, and I suggest you check the app and the reference app to which the claim is being made against.
Everyone is entitled to run whatever the hell they want on their own device. End of.
Technically, he can run his app on his device.
technically, anyone can grab a copy of source, put their phone into developer mode and install the app too.
But- practically, it's hard.
You only get 4 application slots on devices in dev mode for example and I think they also expire.
I tried creating an internal app for my company and was gobsmacked that I didn't have any sane method to distribute it short of taking full ownership of everyones devices via MDM.
You are of course not allowed to publish "internal" apps to Testflight (or the App Store, but that's more obvious).
You're entitled to a way to have others try you software on devices they own that doesn't involve paying Apple $99/year for the privilege.
and you have limitations on app ids. Apple sucks…
Sure, but this developer wants to publish their app through the App Store. Not the same thing as running on their own device.
I am not aware of a way to publish an app without an App Store.
At least on Android you can make them self updating and not care about rest of the ecosystem
You can install development builds on your own iPhone, you just need to enable Developer Mode: https://docs.expo.dev/guides/ios-developer-mode/
Ah but it is!
Web page
Audio software needs low latency. Can you actually make a synth in browser that's good? And integrates with DAWs?
No
“Just try an alt store” is a condescendingly flippant comment - there is near zero market for iOS alt stores and most people in most countries have no access either.
My above comment is not an excuse for design spam. The design spam rule is necessary. Your feedback is not.
Synths have never been a high profit business on iOS. And small earners are not a priority for Apple review. There’s a business case for not being bothered with most indie apps.
To suggest there’s categorically no room for innovation or value add with new synth products is just ignorant though.
There is also near zero market for more Synth Apps at this point so I'm not sure what you want here.
It's like when the App Store started, someone made a Flashlight App and it was cool. We sure had enough of that by now. Now that AI turned everyone into a maker and the bar is lower in a world of abundance, it's only natural that things shift in terms of expectations for distribution.
This is how new markets take shape too, YouTube became so trash that now platforms such as Nebula came out as a business.
If you’re going to suggest an alt store, customers globally should be able to access the alt store you’re suggesting.
So far in the U.S., that’s not an option. You likely already know this, which makes it a flippant argument.
I’m genuinely not sure if you’re doing a bit, especially after explicitly calling out the “entitlement” of the development.
Is “we don’t think there’ll be a market for this” a defensible reason to disqualify an app from the App Store? What’s even your point? You are just looking to be argumentative and pretty clearly have no interest in actually discussing this.
I'll take the callout, I did get emotional. Reason being is because I have bought over 20 synth apps and have worked in the music industry. Looking at the app and the way they reacted to not getting approved made me upset.
An Alt iOS store isn't accessible to everyone in every country either as far as I know.
"Or just try an alt store." What alt store? Pure bs. You must be an Apple shareholder. They are prone to posting delusional excrement like this.
> You can feel the entitlement across the room from the developer.
Apple felt they were entitled to insert themselves as an all powerful gate keeper in program distribution, the least they could do is not be shit at it.
Is entitlement always a problem? Maybe if apple didn't try their best to hold a monopoly on app distribution for a large percentage of the mobile userbase, developers wouldn't feel frustrated in this regard. Who's apple to decide which apps aren't allowed because they "duplicate existing apps", and how fairly is that even applied? Are calculators allowed on the app store? It seems awfully like they duplicate existing functionality.
Ok but now explain why there are tons of absolute trash vibe coded apps that barely do anything in the app store?
First, I am not trusting them at face value. They are building a copycat of Serum and most likely could be doing some level of vibe-coding themselves.
Second, to your point, say we trusted them, it's a chicken or the egg problem. After all the trash entered the space it became flagged and a scale/moderation issue.
The larger problem is the bad actors.
I mean they are entitled to it in a way. You pay Apple 99 Dollars a year to be able to distribute your apps on the store. Why should apple care if it is design spam or a duplicate of an existing app? Most of the apps available in the store would check those boxes too.
Apple has been famously strict about App Store submissions since it started… these comments confused about it make me feel old!