"22 years from cross to launch".
It will be interesting to see if the time to market will be cut in the near future which could lead to an explosion of new flavours and produce products.
They're all propagated from cuttings. You need to to spend 5(ish) years to get a crop to see what the apples actually taste like, then you've got one tree to take cuttings from to get the first 'generation', which you'll be waiting a similar amount of time to get fruit, longer to get a decent crop. It just takes time to scale up the number of trees, from just the one, and then for the trees to get mature enough to bear a decent crop.
Making new apple breeds is mostly creating a bunch of variations/hybrids, and waiting 5 years for it to produce fruit.
This is a good read on it: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/apples-breeding-experi...