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James Steinberg is a New Yorker, 35 years old, and has two professions. The first, cat sitter. The second, develop applications through vibecodinga technique in which knowing what one wants and iterating with AI manages to replace (in part) deep knowledge of areas such as software architecture or programming. Steinberg is not the exception, but the new norm in a phenomenon in which amateur programmers are saturating the software distribution system. Let them tell Apple. Wanting is power. There was a time when publishing an app on the App Store was a rite of passage for an engineer or software developer. After months of fighting with Swift or Objective-C, the app was ready and all that was missing was the blessing of the App Store and its strict terms of use. Today that wall has fallen, because since the vibecoding has appeared, the creation of software is no longer about being able to do things, but about wanting to do them. However, this democratization of programming comes at a price: before the problem was writing code, but now the bottleneck is get the App Store to validate it. The growth rate of apps published in the App Store has grown extraordinary since the end of 2025. The impact of vibecoding is evident. Source: BI. The explosion of agentic software. Data from the consulting firm Sensor Tower confirm that we are facing an extraordinary situation. In January 2026, the volume of new apps launched in the App Store in the US grew 54.8% compared to the previous year. A very similar figure had already been recorded in December: a 56% increase compared to the same month in 2024. Here there is not suddenly a batch of experts fresh out of university programming as if there were no tomorrow, but rather a bunch of “amateur programmers” who have used vibecoding to program their apps in a matter of minutes or hours and who have uploaded them to the App Store. Apple has a problem. When Steinberg or any other developer tries to publish their app on the App Store, they run into a problem: Apple’s validation process is dragging out and the average wait time is around six weeks to achieve the desired “green light.” Apple, aware that this saturation can damage its reputation, has wanted to come forward with figures to calm the market’s spirits. Apple says one thing, developers another. According to the company, 90% of the proposals it receives from all these programmers are reviewed in less than 48 hours, and the average wait is, according to the company, 1.5 days. In the last twelve weeks, Apple employees have analyzed more than 200,000 weekly shipments, which seems to make it clear that, at least according to them, the bottleneck is not that big. The developers don’t seem to be of the same opinion, and in forums and social networks there is talk of how reviews of existing updates take up to a week and new releases enter a kind of administrative limbo that exasperates this new legion of programmers. Apps that are AI Slop? A potential reason for this slowdown in deadlines may not only be the quantity of apps, but their quality. Both among traditional programmers and probably within Apple itself, there is a fear that this new batch of apps “vibecodeadas” is largely another variant of the “AI slop” or “AI Slop” that has already been presented in the form of images or videos. For some experts, many of these apps are mediocre, have been generated with little supervision and simply seek to monetize search niches. The strict terms of the App Store may be criticizable, but they are a kind of retaining wall that could flood the App Store with absolutely irrelevant apps. The App Store facing the dilemma. Forrester analyst Dipanjan Chatterjee indicated in Business Insider that “this is not a problem that Apple can get out of by rejecting apps. As AI accelerates the creation of applications, the company will have to evolve from artisanal surveillance to curation at scale.” Or what is the same: either Apple automates part of the process, or waiting times will continue to increase. The other option: tighten the entry criteria for apps created with AI so much that it disproportionately penalizes the developers who use these tools… of which there are more and more. Wanted vibecoder. What seemed like a hobby for hobbyists is becoming an increasingly striking economic ecosystem. According to Business Insiderplatforms like Lovable already publish job offers in which they are looking for “vibecoders professionals”, which seems to validate this new type of programmer, no matter how much the traditional market criticizes him. But. This avalanche of applications created with AI may be striking, but comments from professional developers usually agree on the same thing: these apps are more difficult to maintain in the long term. Even Linus Torvalds, who had partially fallen into the networks of AI, I warned him: “AI will be a tool, and it will make people more productive. I think vibe coding is great for getting people to start programming. I think (the code it generates) is going to be horrible to maintain… so I don’t think programmers will go away. You’ll still want to have people who know how to maintain the output.” Image | James Yarema In Xataka | Vibe coding wants to help Open Source. But developers don’t want AI botches