The Mythical App Store Reviewer Month
The article discusses the challenges of app review in the Apple App Store, drawing parallels to Fred Brooks's observations in software project management. It argues that simply increasing the number of reviewers will not effectively address the issues of app curation and quality control. The author highlights statistics on app submissions and rejections, questioning the effectiveness of the current review process.
- ▪Apple's App Review team evaluated over 9.1 million app submissions in 2025.
- ▪More than 2 million app submissions were rejected in 2025 for various reasons, including privacy violations.
- ▪The volume of app submissions increased from 130K weekly in 2024 to 175K weekly in 2025.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Previous: Mac App Store: What’s in a name? Articles index Jeff Johnson (My apps, PayPal.Me, Mastodon) 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.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Lapcatsoftware.
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