Average app review times for my Mac app (launched in 2019) have gone up by 3-5x and, it appears others too (tons of posts on Apple’s forums like this one). Mac app reviews now typically take 5 days, and I’m seeing lots of reports of 10+ day waits for some. While iOS app reviews have been faster for me, others have seen big delays there too. It just varies, but it’s clear that reviewers are underwater. This is very likely do to the rise in AI-assisted coding, which has in turn led to more app submissions. According to AppFigures, App Store submissions rose 24% in 2025 through November. According to Runway data, January and February’s average review time and max review times were significantly higher than they were in the last 4 months of 2025.

Apple is failing to meet the moment. Stating the obvious: they need to more heavily invest in and scale up app review to match new conditions.

This isn’t slowing down, there will be more vibe coders next month, not fewer, which will put even more strain on the app review process, which is barely tenable as-is. I wonder if/when app reviewers start leaning on agentic AI tools to help speed up their own processes.

5+ day wait times for Mac apps can not remain the new normal: it’s a clear and major regression for Apple’s app ecosystem. It will likely get worse before it gets better, but in terms of wait times, we are already basically back to where we were before Phil Schiller became the App Store czar in 2015.

My complaint isn’t directed at app reviewers, it’s aimed at their execs: allocate way more resources to this!

A couple of notes: the “Request Expedited Review” process (if you’re willing to burn one of those) can still lead to a snappy review, in a pinch. (And sometimes subsequent submissions remain in the expedited queue.) But you only get a couple(?) of those per year, and more people are likely using them, so your chance of being approved is likely lower or your expedited wait time is likely longer than what it would have been.

I and others have also run into delays in app processing too (which must happen before a build can even be submitted for review) and have personally seen it take up to 10 hours! (I never even thought this step was prone to delays.) I’m not alone; here are a few threads about it, beginning in January 2026. It only bit me once and was probably a glitch, unrelated to the rise in app submissions, but it was extremely frustrating (especially b/c I knew the review would be long too), and the threads show that it has affected developers over a several-week period in 2026.

Tahoe bugs

Scroll to the end if you want to see a couple of flashy Tahoe bugs, but I need to start with a few which have hit me harder, as a macOS user and developer.

First up: I have mitigated two Tahoe bugs where the OS essentially DDOSes my app with either 1) phantom clicks on dropdown controls or 2) by sending my app hundreds of identical system notifications per minute (specifically: NSApplication.didChangeScreenParametersNotification). The first occurred in beta, but the second cropped up around 26.2. I developed workarounds for these issues, but my guess is that plenty of other apps haven’t. My app has been around since 2019 and has never encountered this kind of erratic system behavior before. Perhaps Tahoe’s periodic lagginess that I notice is caused by other user-space apps trying to process similar messages. 🤷‍♂️

I have also encountered a Tahoe bug (that’s impossible to reproduce and that I first noticed after the betas had concluded) where the OS will stop displaying an NSPopover window when .show( is called, leading to frustrated customers who were not seeing their popover, and then a massive effort on my part to develop a fail-detection and fallback system. This bug appeared in the betas and is still active in 26.3. Again, all of these bugs are not on pre-Tahoe macOS versions (my main Mac is still running Sequoia.)

While I shared in the common complaints of ugly border radiuses, awful accessibility, and more, the bugs have been Tahoe’s big red flag for me. Tahoe should be considered a clear sign that critical processes within Apple have broken. Should Apple acknowledge the mess, like their “back to the Mac”-style pow wow, or declare macOS 27 a Snow Leopard/Mountain Lion year?

Simply trying to create an App Preview video in 2026…

This is a minor aside, but while I’m at it, I have to mention how rough it is to create a new App Preview movie using Apple-provided QuickTime and iMovie.

Even if you use iMovie’s “New App Preview” and “Share -> App Preview” options, the resulting video will be rejected by App Store Connect for multiple errors. I had to resort to two old school hacks to get a valid App Preview movie for AppStore Connect. These workarounds have been around for at least 8 years (because that’s when I remember first using them!) but have likely existed for over a decade.

First, I had to add a silent audio track to the project avoid a “corrupted audio” error. Second, the only way to get correct dimensions for the App Preview was to, before importing the video, add an image as the first frame. One would think that iMovie, which sports a “New App Preview” menu option and “App Preview” export option would be a better experience.

Maybe there’s some other app I should be using to package my App Preview?

Ending with a couple of flashy Tahoe bugs

This is what it has been like to try to grab a column resize control (with scrollbars set to hidden) for about 5 months (this was fixed on February 11, 2026, with 26.3):

And 🤪:

Apple listens more to press than they do to their own Feedbacks/Radars, so hopefully this will get through.