First iOS app still “Waiting for Review” after six days

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I paid the $99 annual Apple Developer Program fee and submitted my first iOS app with the understanding that App Review would normally take approximately one or two days.

It has now been six days, and the submission is still sitting in “Waiting for Review.” There has been no review, no request for additional information, no explanation, and no indication that anyone has looked at it.

I understand that review times can vary, especially for a first submission, but six days without even entering review seems excessive. Developers are required to pay Apple before they can distribute an app, yet there appears to be no meaningful service-time commitment or communication when a submission remains untouched.

Is this currently normal for first-time app submissions? At what point is a developer supposed to conclude that the submission is stuck rather than merely delayed?

At this point, I am also wondering whether I should request a refund of the $99 membership fee, since the primary service I paid to access has not been provided within anything resembling the expected timeframe.

Answer 1

swiftySwift.dev OP

11h

I'm in the same boat. And no, this isn't normal. No entrepreneur trying to bring a product to market should be expected to accept this as "just part of the process."

People keep pointing to AI as the excuse. "Oh, they're swamped reviewing all the vibe coded slop."

Really?

We're talking about Apple here...one of the largest, wealthiest companies in the world. Chatbots that write code didn't appear overnight. Agentic tools have been around for at least a year at this point. I mean heck, they're built into Xcode as a first-party feature.

You're telling me that not a single executive in Cupertino had the basic business foresight to anticipate this and scale the review team accordingly? I don't buy it.

I can understand getting backed up around new iOS releases, holidays, etc. But if App Review has been buried under a contiguous backlog for months, to me that sounds like a fundamental failure of planning and resource management...not some "seasonal spike".

At the very least, developers deserve better communication. Weeks or months of silence while the fruit of our labor sits there collecting dust isn't acceptable, especially when we are asked to fund this process out of our own pockets.