NCCapital

The Apple App Store is being flooded with low-effort AI-generated apps at an unprecedented rate. AI-assisted tools have made it so easy that anyone can now “build” and submit an app over a weekend, and many are doing exactly that. Last year alone, developers submitted more than 550,000 new apps to the App Store — a 24% jump from 2024 and the highest volume in nearly a decade. The vast majority of these apps have almost no downloads and generate zero revenue, yet they all go through Apple’s review process. As a result, review times that used to take just a few hours (or a day at most) are now stretching into **weeks**, and in many cases even **months**. Legitimate developers with real products are stuck in “Waiting for Review” purgatory while Apple’s team drowns in a sea of AI spam. The top 1% of apps still take the lion’s share of revenue, while the flood of zero-value submissions makes it harder than ever for quality apps to get noticed or approved quickly. Apple is effectively paying the price for turning the App Store into an open publishing platform with almost no barrier to entry. The question now is how long this can continue before the experience for both users and serious developers completely breaks down.