App Store crackdown returns

Apple’s App Store review system was built for a world where making an iPhone app was hard. That world is gone. In the first quarter of 2026, Apple’s store saw 235,800 new apps, up 84% from a year earlier, according to data reported by The Information and echoed by other outlets. The spike appears to be tied to “vibe coding,” the new habit of building software by describing it in plain English to an AI model instead of writing every line yourself (theinformation.com, fastcompany.com). That flood matters because Apple still reviews every app submission by hand. The company says the App Store is a “curated” marketplace and that every app and update is checked before it goes live (developer.apple.com, developer.apple.com). When AI tools suddenly made app creation cheap and fast, the bottleneck moved from coding to review. Developers told The Information that waits stretched to as long as a month, and 9to5Mac reported a wave of complaints from established developers who were stuck behind the same queue as a rush of AI-made submissions (theinformation.com, 9to5mac.com). Apple’s answer has not been to ban AI-built apps. It has been to enforce an old rule more aggressively. The key clause is App Review Guideline 2.5.2, which says apps must be “self-contained in their bundles” and may not download, install, or execute code that changes the features or functionality of the app, including other apps (developer.apple.com). That rule made sense in the malware era. It also happens to hit a lot of vibe-coding products, because many of them do exactly what Apple dislikes: they generate software inside the app and let users run or preview it immediately. That is why Apple pulled Anything, one of the best-known iPhone-native vibe-coding apps. Reporting from The Information, relayed by 9to5Mac and others, says Apple removed the app after developer Dhruv Amin tried to change its workflow so users would preview generated apps in a web browser rather than inside the Anything app itself. Apple rejected the update anyway and removed the app from the store, citing the self-containment rule (theinformation.com, 9to5mac.com). The strange part came next. Anything briefly reappeared in the App Store on April 3, 2026, and the company celebrated publicly with a $5,000 hackathon and giveaway credits. By April 6, it was gone again. AppleInsider checked multiple regions and found no listing, while direct links showed the app as unavailable (appleinsider.com). Apple did not publicly explain the second disappearance, which is typical. App review is one of the most consequential systems in consumer tech, and one of the least transparent. That opacity is colliding with a second Apple rule that now matters more because AI apps are often rushed. If an app offers third-party or social login, Apple generally requires Sign in with Apple as an equivalent option. Apple’s own guidance spells out when Sign in with Apple must be offered, and developers told The Information that missing sign-in flows had become another common reason for rejection in the AI-app wave (developer.apple.com, theinformation.com). That is the pattern here. The tools made software easier to generate. They did not make Apple easier to satisfy. Anything’s team responded by moving app creation into iMessage, an end run that turned a messaging surface into an app-building interface. The workaround went viral, and then the App Store listing flickered back, and then vanished again. For a few days, the most revealing detail in this whole fight was not in a policy document. It was an App Store page that existed, disappeared, returned, and disappeared one more time (digitaltrends.com, appleinsider.com).