📱 The Queue Doesn't Know the Difference July 22, 2026 · https://tavi-blog.github.io/the-queue-doesnt-know-the-difference/

Apple's app review used to be the annoying part of shipping something, not the part that decided whether shipping was worth it at all. A small update could clear in a day, sometimes less. Lately, by the account of developers watching the same queue I once sat in, that timeline has stretched into weeks, and in some cases longer, for reasons that have nothing to do with Apple adding staff or slowing down on purpose. The queue got a lot more company. Something like half a million new apps landed in the App Store in the first six months of this year alone, and a large share of them share a specific origin: someone described what they wanted in a prompt, a coding tool wrote it, and it went up without much more thought than that. People have started calling it vibe coding, casually enough that the term needs no introduction anymore.

I went through that queue for a small tracking app I built and shipped a few years ago, before that term was something anyone used. It took a couple of days from submission to approval, most of it waiting rather than working, and the actual friction wasn't the code review, it was the developer account setup, the metadata requirements, the parts of the process that exist to catch a beginner doing something wrong rather than to catch a bad idea. I remember thinking, at the time, that Apple's review was mostly a formality dressed up as gatekeeping. It's harder to think that now.

The instinct to dismiss all of this as noise, or to blame the tools outright, misses what's actually going on. AI-assisted coding lowering the barrier to shipping something is not, on its own, a bad development. I built my own app with a coding assistant doing a meaningful share of the work, and a tool making that possible for someone without a formal engineering background is closer to the honest version of "more people can build things" than most of the language around it usually earns. Somebody with an idea and no computer science degree being able to turn it into a working prototype over a weekend is a real expansion of who gets to try. I don't think the problem is that the barrier came down.

The problem is that a review process built to catch mistakes at a certain scale is now absorbing a flood of submissions that were never really trying to clear a bar, because there was no bar in mind when they were built. An app with no plan for who uses it, submitted mostly because submitting was easy, still occupies the same queue slot as an app somebody spent real evenings on after a full day of other work. Apple takes its cut either way and hasn't visibly scaled the human side of review to match the new volume, so the cost of the flood lands on whoever's waiting behind it, not on whoever caused it. That's a familiar shape for anyone who has watched a shared, finite resource get overwhelmed by submissions that carry none of the congestion cost themselves.

What I find almost funny is who's actually doing the sorting work right now. Not Apple. A community of iOS app builders started tiering submissions on their own, pushing anything without a track record into a separate thread and requiring apps built primarily with AI-generated code to flag themselves as such before posting. That's moderation the platform hasn't built, done by the people the platform's failure to build it costs the most. Apple collects its percentage whether an app has one download or a hundred thousand, so the flood is somebody else's problem to manage, and for now that somebody is a group of strangers running a manual flair system because no one upstream of them will.

I don't know what the actual fix looks like from Apple's side, and I'm skeptical it arrives soon, because nothing about the current setup punishes the behavior that's causing the backlog. Charging for submissions might do it, or it might just tax the same solo developers who are already absorbing the wait. What I keep coming back to is a smaller, more selfish question. If I build something else worth shipping, do I still put it through that queue and hope it reads as different from the pile it's sitting in, or do I start looking at whether App Store review is even the right place left to prove an app is real.