Is anyone actually reviewing apps right now? Apps stuck in review for weeks/months...

Is anyone actually actively reviewing apps right now, or is there a major system backlog/glitch? Has anyone managed to get through to the review team recently or found a way to resolve this kind of delay?

The App Store review process seems to be running smoothly the 99.2% of submissions that aren't complaining about it here in the developer forums.

same here, waiting 10 days now…

And the 99.2%???? Where did you get that number? At least you’re seeing status. Tell us where… or are you just making it up?

And the 99.2%???? Where did you get that number? At least you’re seeing status. Tell us where… or are you just making it up?

I'm getting it from the 2025 App Store Transparency report and my own review of activity in the developer forum.

Apple reviews about 25,000 submissions every day.

The developer forum shows 10 pages of 20 threads per page. A single day's activity fills up about 10 pages.

So at worst, there are 200 complaints per day, or 0.8%. Of course, there are statistical caveats all over the place. But the raw volume of App Store submission activity clearly downs all of it out.

I'm not seeing any status. I'm only posting here in the forums because I have so much personal stuff going on that I can't focus on my work very well. My last submission was a couple of months ago. I waited for review for about an hour and a half, and then the review itself completed in about an hour. Logically, if my experience was that far from the norm, there should be even more complaints. I do see a few complaints on slack channels. Those are typically from people who self-identify as "indie" developers. Make of that what you will.

Why can't I be this lucky when playing the lottery

@wrensey, don't use the comments. They hide your replies. Apple just updated the forum UI too, but they kept the comments feature? <sigh>

App Review is not a statistically random system. In the past, it was driven by the metadata, attributes, and quality of the submitted apps. Over time, the information used for review has clearly expanded to include other developer activity. And more recently, Apple is acknowleding that it now uses AI. So any developer activity is going to be fed back into the system and used to try to make the app review system more efficient in terms of publishing app updates. If the AI thinks your submission is likely to be rejected, it makes sense that it should prefer other submissions that it thinks are more likely to succeed.

To be clear, I don't work for Apple and I have no idea how the system works. I'm simply speculating on how I would design an ideal app review system. But I admit that, in most cases, Apple systems are far from my conceptual ideals.