If you build iPhone and iPad apps, the wait between submitting an update and seeing it in the App Store has quietly become much longer. Synth Anatomy, a music technology site, reports that developers of iOS music apps now face reviews lasting weeks rather than days, and rejections that read as if no person looked at the app. The site links the change to a flood of new apps that AI coding tools have made easy to produce.
The scale is the starting point. Synth Anatomy estimates 10 to 20 new iOS music apps reach the market every day, many of them created with AI help. Apple's own guidance says App Review typically handles at least 50% of submissions in under 24 hours and 90% in under 48. Developers quoted in the piece describe something very different: AudioThing's Materia took 25 days to be approved after one rejection, and its newer Seconds had been in review for 29 days and counting. Pittsburgh Modular planned a simultaneous launch for its Microvolt 3901 synth, but the iOS version arrived on 12 November, more than two weeks after the plugin version on 27 October.
The rejections are the more troubling part. Michael Hetrick of Unfiltered Audio says one plugin was rejected four times over more than a month, once on the grounds that a descriptive word needed a licence, and once because its MIDI version looked too similar to the audio version. He released the audio version alone. Marek Dendes, a newer developer, says his synthesizer was rejected four times in a row as design spam made with app-generation templates, moving from in review to rejected within a second, with appeals unanswered after about five days.
Hetrick believes Apple is using AI to automate parts of review, which would be an ironic reply to AI-made apps. For anyone using tools such as Claude Code, Cursor or app generators to ship mobile apps, it is a reminder that distribution, not code, may now be the bottleneck, and that a genuine app can be caught in filters built for spam.
The evidence has limits. The examples come from forum posts and one specialist site, not from Apple or a systematic count of review times. Apple has not confirmed it uses AI in review or explained the delays, and the experiences described are concentrated among music app makers. Whether the slowdown is wider, and whether Apple adds more human reviewers, is not yet known.