Apple’s App Store is in the middle of its steepest submission surge in years. Developers submitted nearly 600,000 new apps last year, marking a 30 percent jump over the previous year. That number has already doubled to roughly 560,000 new apps in just the first six months of this year, according to estimates from analytics firm Sensor Tower cited by the New York Times. The reason behind the spike is vibecoding, which allows people with no prior development experience to create new apps using AI tools.
A familiar boom, with a twist
The App Store has seen big submission numbers before. New releases peaked at about 890,000 in 2016, then steadily declined for years, bottoming out around 420,000 by 2022. The current surge marks a sharp reversal of that decline, but this wave looks different from the last one. While the past boom came largely from professional developers, this one is being driven by people with no coding background at all.
The Times points to a Chicago engineer who used AI tools to build and publish two apps despite never having made one before. His first took seven weeks between building and preparing it for the App Store, and brought in 1,300 downloads. His second came together in about a week and pulled in 20,000 downloads. He’s now planning to quit his day job to build apps full time.
Stories like this are part of why the submission count keeps climbing. But more people building apps doesn’t automatically mean more people using them, and that’s where the numbers start to diverge.
More apps don’t necessarily mean more money for Apple
According to Sensor Tower, App Store downloads climbed only 3 percent last year and 2 percent so far this year, a fraction of the pace of new submissions. Since Apple takes a cut from developers on purchases, the widening gap between submissions and downloads means the surge isn’t translating into proportional revenue. A company spokesperson pushed back on the idea that downloads tell the whole story, framing them as just one measure of the App Store’s overall value.
The surge may be straining Apple in another way, too. Since the company reviews every app before it goes live, the sudden increase in submissions appears to have slowed down the process. According to reports on Apple’s developer forums, some developers have had to wait weeks for approval with little communication. Apple also disputed this, telling the Times it clears 90 percent of submissions within 48 hours.
Even if Apple keeps pace with its reviews, it doesn’t mean what gets through is worth downloading. Phillip Shoemaker, who ran the App Store from 2009 to 2016, told the Times that a flood of low-effort apps isn’t necessarily a problem for a storefront with no shelf space. In his view, the real risk is that it becomes easier for bad actors to slip something harmful past reviewers. But that framing may undersell a different cost, one that shows up less in security reports and more on user forums.
What the numbers don’t show
I’ve seen that cost on forums like Reddit, where posts about new apps almost always draw some version of the same comment, “Is this vibecoded?” Nobody asks that as a compliment. Scroll through enough threads, and the pattern becomes obvious. A lot of these apps don’t bring anything new to the table. They’re low-effort copycats of apps that already exist, dressed up with just enough polish or a slightly different layout.
Some are outright broken or security nightmares, built by people without enough coding experience to catch and fix issues on their own. A few that do work just feel like they didn’t need to exist, and there are more of them showing up every week than anyone has the patience to sort through.
That fatigue has shown up in actual moderation decisions too. Moderators of r/iosapps rolled out a tiered system that pushes any app without an established track record, whether that’s App Store reviews, a GitHub repository, or a recognized developer flair, into a separate megathread instead of the main feed. Apps built primarily with AI-generated code carry the requirement to flair themselves as “Vibe Coded,” a distinction the subreddit treats as higher priority than pricing details, like whether the app is free or has a paid subscription.
That’s the part the submission and download numbers can’t capture. A rising app count doesn’t tell you how many of those apps are actually worth downloading. Things have reached a point where people have started compiling telltale signs of a vibecoded app, dismissing them on sight without checking whether it’s one of the good ones. That instinct makes sense given how much noise is out there, but it also means some useful apps are getting buried under the suspicion earned by everything else in the pile.
