AI Slop Flood Causes App Store Review Backlog

The widespread adoption of AI development tools and vibe coding has sharply lowered the barriers to building and submitting apps, flooding Apple’s App Store with low-quality AI apps that often duplicate existing features. The trend is increasing the burden on human reviewers and making malware, privacy risks and misleading content harder to detect, testing Apple’s existing quality-control mechanisms.

App Store reviews, which typically took 24–48 hours, have recently stretched to as long as 45 days, delaying even compliant developers’ new releases and security patches. Apple has also begun restricting updates to some vibe-coding apps that can generate and execute code in real time, signaling tighter controls on dynamic code as AI app submissions surge.