I am at 4/24 for sure, and I was added as an AU to my wife's CFU recently. While I know that being an AU does not count towards 5/24, I have heard that it does by default, but that recon can take care of it.
I need to shore up my United MileagePlus account for an upcoming J award ticket, and the Explorer's 60k/70k SUB (up from 40k via a promotion) was just the enticement I needed. The $95 AF is waived the first year. It also includes other benefits such as two United Club one time passes per year and $100 Global Entry credit. We are expats who travel fairly regularly (well, at least we did until 2020...), so the travel benefits are useful to us.
Another possible roadblock I have is that my income is barely more than my total Chase credit. The minimum SL for the Explorer is $5k. I do have plenty of available credit on other Chase cards that I could move around if necessary, so I wasn't too worried about that.
Anyway, I applied on Monday, Feb 8. It immediately went to the 30 day notice. I kept calling the automated line, and it never changed from that. I was planning to wait until the message went to "7 to 10 days" or "14 days" or something, and then call recon. I just expected that calling recon would be necessary because of my 5/24 status and Chase credit limit vs income.
This morning (I'm on UTC time, same as the UK) I logged into my Chase account, and a new credit card was added to the list! While I was expecting to be able to eventually be approved for the card, I was not expecting to get it without help from recon.
They gave me a $5,300 SL. It's almost tax time, so hitting the SUB will be quite convenient even without organic spend. I might even do the extra $3k spend for the extra 10k MileagePlus points.
Congrats on your Chase United Explorer Approval🎉👍
Congratulations on your approval!
Grats on the UE approval 
