iOS app review delays plague developers, Elon Musk calls the process "ridiculous"

According to several reports on social media, app reviews for iOS are now exceeding the time that many developers spent building entire features. The head of product at X, Nikita Bier, asked fellow iOS developers how long it’s taking for reviews, and many people shared a similar experience. Elon Musk quoted the post from Nikita, calling the delays ridiculous.

Developers are facing unpredictable waits that stall their launches. Some apps sit in “Waiting for review” for days or weeks on end, while others receive bizarre rejections that don’t make sense. 

A frustrated developer shared that an app reviewer tried to test the app on an iPhone 17 Pro Max, which was running iPadOS. This is meaningless, and the response sparked laughs throughout the internet.

Another team confirmed the same odd rejection, which arrived at 4 AM California time. Such weird rejections are leading people to suspect that automatic AI screening is causing such errors. Several people now believe Apple’s review teams are allegedly flooded with vibe-coded apps, leading to delays and weird rejections (which counterintuitively could be using AI).

Several posts reveal a clear pattern, where developers have to wait at least two weeks for routine updates, and AI-generated apps are flooding the queue. An indie team spent two full months fighting endless loops of non-issues before getting approval.

Threads on Reddit echo the same sentiment, where many developers report apps getting stuck for up to 45 days since early 2026. An exception seems to be Epic Games, since they’re getting speedy approvals to reviews ever since their legal court battle with Apple. While larger companies seem to have some priority, smaller teams lack such leverage.

Delays such as this hurt innovation, and an easy fix is for Apple to expand its app review team or improve the automated review process system as a whole.

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