The queue got longer. The shelf didn't.

Appfigures, the analytics firm that tracks both major app stores, put a number on something developers have been feeling all year: 557,000 new apps hit Apple’s App Store in 2025, a 24% jump over 2024 and the highest count since 2016. Then the first quarter of 2026 blew past that pace — worldwide releases up 60% year over year across Apple’s store and Google Play combined, iOS alone up 80%. None of that growth came from more people wanting apps. It came from the cost of making one falling close to zero.

The mechanism is natural-language app generation — tools that turn a text prompt into a working iOS build, no Swift required. Apple’s response has been telling. Rather than trying to curate its way through the flood, it went after the generators directly. Apple blocked update approvals for Replit and Vibecode, and in March pulled a third app called Anything from the store, citing guideline 2.5.2 — the rule against an app downloading or executing code that changes its own features after review. The developer tried rerouting the code execution into a browser window instead of running it natively; Apple rejected that too, though the app was back on the store within days. On June 8, Apple tightened the App Review Guidelines again, adding sharper language around low-quality apps under the existing 4.3 spam rule. Two enforcement mechanisms, six weeks apart, both aimed at the same thing: not the individual bad app, but the machine that makes an unlimited number of them.

That’s the tell. A quality problem gets solved with review. A supply problem gets solved by closing the tap. Apple picked the second one, because the first one doesn’t scale. The App Store’s own advertising arm states that 70% of visitors find apps through search, which means discovery still runs through a results page with maybe ten visible slots per query. Submission volume can climb 80% in a quarter. The number of first-page search positions cannot climb at all. Every new entrant is competing for the same fixed shelf, and the shelf hasn’t grown since the interface was designed.

I’d have believed this was a new problem if the numbers from the last time submissions ran this hot didn’t already tell the same story. 2016 was the previous peak, when annual new-app counts last approached a million. Sensor Tower’s data from that same window found that the top 1% of monetizing publishers on the U.S. App Store took 94% of the store’s revenue in the first quarter of that year — $1.34 billion split among 623 publishers, with the other 61,677 splitting what was left. That concentration predates generative anything. It was already the case, a decade ago, that flooding the store with more submissions didn’t create more winners. It just added more entrants to the queue behind the same handful of doors.

The honest counter is that not all of this is noise. Appfigures’ own category breakdown for Q1 2026 shows productivity apps entering the top five release categories for the first time, with utilities and lifestyle apps also climbing — a shift toward tools people actually open repeatedly, not just novelty. And the platform itself has zero incentive to fix any of this: third-party estimates put App Store revenue somewhere near $117 billion in 2025, and Apple collects a cut of that whether the app came from a twelve-person studio or a single prompt. The flood is a problem for the marginal developer trying to get found. It is not a problem for Apple’s income statement, which is exactly why the fix arrived as a code-execution rule instead of a search overhaul.

The same shape is showing up one layer over, in the Chrome Web Store — Google’s own numbers put AI involvement in roughly 17% of new extensions built over the past year, with monthly developer registrations more than doubling. Different store, same physics: building got cheap first, and getting found didn’t move.

My bet is that “anyone can build it now” was never the part that mattered. It didn’t make building worth less — it made the distribution bottleneck arrive in weeks instead of years, for anyone naive enough to think shipping was the hard part. It always ran through the same ten search results and the same top row of charts. AI just bought everyone a much faster ticket to that line.