App Store Review Is Becoming a Bottleneck for Mobile Releases

An interesting observation from the mobile market.

I recently chatted with a neighbor who works at a large European product company. Their iOS update got stuck—not a brand-new app, not anything unusual, just a normal weekly release. The only problem was that the release ran into the App Store review queue.

And it looks like this isn’t an isolated story anymore.

Apple says review is fast—but developers are reporting long waits

Officially, Apple states that 90% of submissions are reviewed in under 24 hours. But if you look at the Apple Developer Forums over the last few weeks, you’ll find a wave of developers reporting apps sitting in Waiting for Review for 10, 17, 23+ days—and in some cases, even longer.

The moderation volume is rising

The scale of App Store review is massive, and it’s clearly growing. Apple’s own published numbers are pretty telling:

• 2023: 6.89M submissions reviewed, 1.76M rejected
• 2024: 7.77M submissions reviewed, 1.93M rejected
• 2025: ~557K new apps launched on the App Store (+24% YoY), the strongest growth in many years

A new bottleneck: publishing, not just development

The takeaway for me is simple: the bottleneck isn’t only engineering anymore. Publishing is now part of the critical path.

If review times become unpredictable, it changes how teams plan releases, respond to incidents, and ship weekly (or even daily) iterations. The more the App Store grows, the more “release management” starts to include a factor that’s external, variable, and largely out of your control.

In other words: on mobile, speed isn’t only about how fast you build—it’s also about how fast you can get approved.