If App Store Connect has held your submission at "Waiting for Review" longer than you remember from previous releases, you are running into the 2025 slowdown that hit developer feeds across iOS and Mac. The 24 hour median Apple cites still applies to most apps, but the slow tail has stretched, and the right response depends on where in the queue you actually sit.
Short answer
Apple's published median target is still 24 hours for most submissions, and the live data from third-party trackers in mid-2025 keeps that floor intact for the bulk of apps. The visible shift is in the tail: a higher share of submissions now sit in "Waiting for Review" for three to seven days, and category-sensitive apps (health, finance, kids, gambling) and Mac App Store builds can stretch to 10 days or more. The most credible explanation is the rise in AI-coded app submissions, with App Store submissions reported up roughly 24 percent in 2025 according to coverage of AppFigures data.
What you should know
- Apple's stated target holds in the median, not the tail. Apple's App Review page still cites 90 percent of submissions reviewed within 24 hours, but the slow 10 percent has grown wider in 2025.
- Status changes signal review, not approval. "Waiting for Review" can sit unchanged for days while reviewers are queued. "In Review" usually moves within hours once it starts.
- Mac App Store reviews are running longer than iOS. Public reports document five to ten day averages on macOS submissions, well above the cross-store mean.
- Expedited review is real, narrow, and not a shortcut. Apple grants it for critical bugs, security issues, or time-sensitive events, not routine releases.
- Self-rejecting and resubmitting sometimes clears a stuck queue. Developer forum reports describe the same submission moving normally on the second try after a long stall.
- Sensitive categories carry their own queue. Apps that touch finance, health, gambling, or government-issued ID checks routinely take longer at any time of year.
What does "longer than usual" actually mean in 2025?
In practice, "longer than usual" in 2025 means a submission has been in either "Waiting for Review" or "In Review" for more than 48 hours without movement, which sits clearly outside Apple's stated 24 hour target band. The third-party tracker Runway live App Store review times reports a rolling average of "Waiting for Review" times near 9 to 10 hours and "In Review" averages under 2 hours across its sample. Anything that visibly exceeds those by more than a factor of three is what most developers describe as the "longer than usual" pattern in the Apple Developer Forums and Reddit r/iOSProgramming threads.
The exact threshold matters because Apple's published number (90 percent within 24 hours per the App Review page) is a percentile, not a guarantee. Ten percent of submissions falling outside that window is, by definition, normal. The 2025 conversation is whether that 10 percent has grown heavier and wider. The available evidence from live trackers, vendor reports, and forum patterns points to yes, with the slow tail visibly thicker than it was in 2024.
Why are App Review queues running longer this year?
The pattern most often named is the surge of AI-coded app submissions. App Store submissions rose roughly 24 percent through 2025 compared to the prior year according to AppFigures coverage, a step that Apple's published review staffing did not appear to match. The submission surge is concentrated in two segments that take longer to review on a per-app basis: AI wrappers (which require human review under Guideline 4.3 patterns) and no-code builder output (which can fail automated checks for SDK metadata, Privacy Manifest fields, or App Tracking Transparency).
A second pattern is the seasonal one. Apple traditionally pauses review around the U.S. winter holidays (the App Store Connect holiday notice usually appears in early December), and queues take one to three weeks to drain after that. Submissions made in the week before WWDC (early June) and the week before the iOS major release in September also tend to sit longer because review staff are partly reallocated to the platform launch.
A third pattern is the category one. Apple's reviewers send certain categories to specialized lanes: health, fintech, gambling, kids, and government services. Those lanes have always been slower; what changed in 2025 is that AI-generated submissions to those categories also rose, which lengthens the queue inside the lane.
When do delays cluster the most?
Delays are not evenly distributed across the year. The table below summarizes the most common periods of slowdown in App Store Connect timing, drawn from a combination of Apple's own holiday announcements, the Runway live tracker, and patterns reported on the Apple Developer Forums.
| Period | Typical effect on review time | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| December 20 to January 2 | Submissions paused for several days | Apple posts holiday schedule; releases delayed |
| First two weeks of January | Two to four day average | Backlog from holiday freeze drains slowly |
| Early June (WWDC week) | One to two day shift | Review staff partly reallocated |
| Mid-September (iOS release week) | Three to five day average | Volume spike from compatibility updates |
| Throughout 2025 (post-AI surge) | Slow tail wider than 2024 | Reported across iOS and Mac App Store |
| Health, fintech, kids, gambling categories | Often five to ten days | Specialist review lanes; year-round |
If a submission overlaps two or three of those rows, the queue can stretch past 10 days without anything actually being wrong with the build. The reverse is also true: in a quiet stretch (late January, late February, mid-August), most apps clear within hours.
How do you tell waiting from being stuck?
The honest answer is that a build at three days is almost certainly still in queue, and a build at ten days deserves a polite check-in. The signals to watch are concrete:
- The status has not changed in over seven days, with no Resolution Center message and no email from App Review.
- The same Apple ID has submitted multiple builds in the same window, and one specific build is the outlier.
- The submission overlapped a known freeze (December 24 through January 2) and is now 14 days past the freeze without movement.
- The reviewer has not opened a Resolution Center thread to ask for clarification, a demo account, or a test scenario.
When two or three of those align, contacting Apple Developer Support through the App Store Connect Help form is reasonable. Use the App Review topic, name the version and submission date, and ask politely for a status check. Do not request an expedited review unless the eligibility criteria fit.
PTKD.com (https://ptkd.com) covers the parallel question of how to read App Store Connect statuses in its Waiting for Review explainer, which helps when the status string itself is the confusion rather than the wait time.
When can you ask Apple to expedite the review?
Expedited review is real, but Apple narrows the criteria each year. According to Apple's Contact Us flow, you can request an expedite when you face a critical bug (crashes, loss of essential features, security vulnerability) or a time-sensitive event you are directly associated with (a sports tournament, conference, regulated launch, court-ordered release date). Routine releases, marketing dates, and feature parity with a competitor do not qualify.
When approved, expedited reviews complete in roughly 4 to 12 hours from approval, per reports gathered by Median.co and several developer-facing sites. Apple's own reply on whether you qualify typically arrives within 24 to 48 hours. The expedite is allocated on a limited basis and granted at Apple's discretion. Repeated requests on the same submission are read as misuse and can cost you future grants.
For an app that is simply taking longer than usual but works fine, the right reflex is not an expedite request. The better step is a polite Developer Support note that asks for a status update, plus patience for the queue to drain on its own.
What to watch out for
Three avoidable mistakes show up often when a review runs long.
First, do not cancel the submission without a concrete reason. Cancelling resets your queue position. Forum reports do mention cases where a self-rejection plus a fresh upload moved faster, but those were after 10 days of stall, not 48 hours. Patience usually wins.
Second, do not ship a duplicate submission under a second SKU to "race" the first. App Review treats duplicate submissions from the same developer as a Guideline 4.3 design spam signal, which is the opposite of what you want. Apple's App and submission statuses reference is clear that only one in-progress submission per app version is expected.
Third, do not promise the App Store a launch date in your investor update or marketing plan that depends on review clearing in two days. Treat the 24 hour target as a median, not a contract, and budget a week. If the launch is genuinely time-sensitive, your contact form to Apple should say so plainly and in advance, not at hour 36.
One myth worth rejecting outright: "Apple slows the queue for indie developers." There is no public evidence for this. The volume surge plus the specialized review lanes accounts for the slow tail in 2025 without any team-size discrimination needing to be true.
Key takeaways
- Most submissions still clear within 24 to 48 hours in 2025, but the slow tail is wider than in 2024, driven mostly by the AI-coded submission surge and category-specific review lanes.
- Build for a one-week budget rather than a 24 hour budget when a release is time-sensitive, even when the median says otherwise.
- Read the App Store Connect status carefully: "Waiting for Review" is queue time, "In Review" is active review, and only the second one should move within hours.
- Reach out to Apple Developer Support through the standard contact form after seven days of no movement, and reserve expedited requests for the eligibility Apple actually lists.
- Some teams use external automated scanning before submission to clear avoidable rejections that add days to a re-review cycle; PTKD.com (https://ptkd.com) is one of the platforms aligned with OWASP MASVS for pre-submission scans of APK, AAB, and IPA builds.
