The Mythical App Store Reviewer Month

The Mythical App Store Reviewer Month

May 22 2026

The Mythical Man-Month is a book by Fred Brooks about software project management. The book has become famous in the industry, along with an observation from the book known as Brooks’s law:

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

I’d like to make an analogy between software development and Apple App Store review. A common, cursory reaction to the obvious failures of app review, the continual appearance of countless scams in the App Store, is to suggest that Apple hire more reviewers. My contention is that adding reviewers is not a solution to the problem of App Store curation, and the belief in such a solution is a myth. I don’t claim that hiring more reviewers would make app review slower. Rather, I think that meaningful, effective curation can’t be measured simply by the amount of available labor, much like Brooks argues that the possibility of measuring useful work in units of time, man-months, is a myth.

Here are some statistics from an Apple web page about the App Store:

Nearly 2M apps available worldwide.

Every week, nearly 500 dedicated experts around the world review over 130K apps.

In 2024, more than 1.9M app submissions were rejected for reasons that include privacy violations and fraudulent activity.

Apple provided some updated statistics in an article a few days ago:

In 2025, the App Review team evaluated more than 9.1 million app submissions, helping to welcome over 306,000 new developers to the platform. In addition, the team rejected over 2 million app submissions — including over 1.2 million new apps and nearly 800,000 app updates — for failing to adhere to the App Review Guidelines.

Apple also rejected over 22,000 submissions for containing hidden or undocumented features; over 371,000 submissions that copied other apps, were found to be spam, or otherwise misled users; and over 443,000 submissions for privacy violations.

The volume of submissions increased from 130K weekly in 2024 to 175K weekly in 2025. Apple does not say whether the number of app reviewers increased but does make the following claim:

As powerful AI development tools drive a surge in app submissions, Apple’s App Review process has seamlessly scaled to handle the volume and to help ensure every new app and app update meets the App Store’s high standards for privacy, security, and quality.

Some App Store developers dispute this claim, based on their experience of increasing review times. For the sake of argument, I’m willing to assume that the ratio of reviewers to submissions is approximately the same now as it was in 2024, because I don’t think that makes much of a difference.

I’ve always found it odd that Apple appears to be bragging about these statistics, yet if you do the math, the statistics turn out to be somewhat embarrassing. Based on the 2024 numbers, over 130K app submissions every week reviewed by nearly (in other words, fewer than) 500 “dedicated experts” (a characterization I would question) means 260 reviews per week on average by each reviewer. If we assume, extremely generously, that 500 reviewers work 40 hours every week with no meetings, no training, no breaks, and no vacations, that leaves less than 10 minutes of review time on average for each submission. Note that a submission includes not just an app but also App Store metadata such as the app description, release notes, external links (developer website and privacy policy), etc. And many submissions do get “metadata rejected”! One of the greatest sins in Apple’s eyes is to mention Apple prerelease software in your release notes, even if Apple has already publicly promoted this prerelease software on their website and at their Worldwide Developer Conference (coming next month). Another great sin is to mention in some obscure place on your website linked from the app or App Store a possible way of getting the app or service without using Apple as an intermediary, and thus without Apple getting a cut of the revenue; reviewers are uncannily effective at finding these obscure web mentions within the few allotted minutes.

The App Review Guidelines are extensive and pedantic. The majority of the guidelines have little or nothing to do with preventing what I would call App Store scams. Of the over 2M rejections in 2025, only 371K seem to fall into this category (“copied other apps, were found to be spam, or otherwise misled users”), which in my view is shockingly low, given what I see in the App Store every time I look. That’s only about 7K scams caught per week by Apple, or about 14 per week per reviewer. Perhaps “shockingly low” is the wrong expression: I consider that inexcusably incompetent. And if Apple did in fact hire more reviewers in 2025 than in 2024, increasing the staff beyond 500, then the numbers per reviewer would be even worse.

In my many years of experience as an App Store developer, an App Store user, and an App...