Genuine question: how are 500 people running the Apple App Store?
Especially how are they going to be able to review/approve/reject the mountain of AI apps coming?
Because that wave is coming fast.
Vibe coding.
Natural language to production apps.
One-person teams shipping what used to take entire orgs.
The App Store review process was built for a world where software was scarce and slow to make. That world is gone.
AI collapses the cost and time of creation. The supply of apps is about to explode. Not incrementally. Exponentially.
Apple’s current model is still:
• Manual review
• Human judgment
• Centralized gatekeeping
That worked when developers were the bottleneck.
They aren’t anymore.
This feels like one of those moments where the old rules quietly stop working.
Apple still controls distribution today. But the future interface for discovering and trusting software is very much up for grabs.