GoKawiilSince January, Replit’s iOS app has been stuck on the same version. The rankings show it slipping. First to second, then to third in Apple’s free developer tools category.
In March, The Information reported what was happening. Apple had blocked updates to several AI coding apps, including Replit and Vibecode. The cited rule was App Store Review Guideline 2.5.2: apps must be self-contained in their bundles and may not “execute code which introduces or changes features or functionality.” The rule has existed for years. It predates the category of software it is now being applied to.
According to the report, Apple was close to approving Replit’s updates if the company stopped previewing generated apps inside its iOS client and opened them in Safari instead. The fix wasn’t “stop generating code.” It was “stop showing the generated thing inside the reviewed thing.”
A week later, Apple’s enforcement escalated. On March 26, the company pulled an app called Anything from the App Store entirely, citing the same rule. Anything’s co-founder Dhruv Amin had spent the previous three months trying to comply, submitting four different technical rewrites in response to Apple’s feedback. The final attempt did exactly what Apple had reportedly suggested to Replit: route generated app previews through an external web browser instead of an in-app web view. Apple rejected the update and removed the existing version anyway.
Several months in, the standoff has not been resolved.
To understand what the rule is doing, it helps to take Apple’s position at its most charitable. The App Store’s premise is that the artifact reviewed at submission is the artifact that runs on the user’s device. When Replit displays a generated app inside an embedded web view, the reviewed Replit binary effectively contains an unbounded number of unreviewed apps. The wrapper got reviewed. The contents did not. From Apple’s perspective, the review didn’t review anything.
Apple has had complicated rules around interpreters, downloadable code, browsers within browsers, and JavaScript-heavy apps for as long as the App Store has existed. Each round, the runtime got more flexible, and platform owners drew a new line. The lines moved. The premise behind them did not: software is a thing you can hold still long enough to inspect.
Underneath the question of motive, there is a real epistemological problem. Apple’s reviewers don’t have a method for evaluating software whose behavior is determined at runtime by a model. The existing review process has nothing to look at. The wrapper is reviewable. What the wrapper does at three in the morning on a user’s phone, after a user types a prompt no reviewer ever saw, is not.
The reviewable artifact and the running artifact are not the same kind of thing.
It is not just reviews. Almost every layer of the modern software-distribution stack was built on the same premise.
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