Apple's App Store Sees 84% Jump in New App Submissions with AI Vibe Coding

AI-powered "vibe coding" tools have driven an 84% jump in new app submissions to Apple's App Store in a single quarter — the largest surge in a decade. The flood is straining Apple's review infrastructure, with approval times ballooning from 24 hours to as many as 30 days. The phenomenon of vibe coding was coined by Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI and former AI lead at Tesla — vibe coding is the practice of building software by describing what you want in plain language and letting a large language model write the code. Apple says it is not targeting vibe coding as a category but rather enforcing its guidelines, which prohibit apps from changing their behaviour after review — the very capability that defines vibe coding apps. Critics argue Apple's crackdown "puts it on the wrong side of history," contending the review-based model was conceived for a world that no longer exists.

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