Anther culture of apple is the most effective technique for the production of doubled haploids which improves apple genetic studies and breeding. To improve the regeneration process of the obtained androgenic plants and achieve high conversion efficiency of embryos into plants in anther culture, six cultivars, ‘ASP’, ‘Danxian’, ‘Fuji’, ‘Gala’, ‘SD’, and ‘Senshu’, were used to investigate the effect of sucrose concentration on root formation from low temperature treated embryos and the effect of plant growth regulators in the shoot regeneration medium for rooted and nonrooted embryos. The results indicated that cold treatment medium containing 1.5% sucrose showed the highest root formation in the three cultivars ‘ASP’, ‘Senshu’ and ‘SD’. The rooted embryos readily developed into shoots compared to the nonrooted embryos. For rooted embryos, the preferred medium for shoot regeneration was 1/2 MS hormone-free medium containing 1.5% sucrose, whereas the preferred medium for nonrooted embryos was MS or 1/2 MS medium containing 2.22 or 4.44 μM (0.5 or 1.0 mg L⁻¹) BAP and 3% sucrose. The genotype also played an important role in the process of plant regeneration from anther culture-derived embryos in apple. The cultivars ‘ASP’ (14.4%), ‘SD’ (6.2%) and ‘Danxian’ (6.0%) showed the highest rates of embryo regeneration. The cultivars ‘Danxian’, ‘Gala’, and ‘Senshu’ showed the highest rates of shoot regeneration from embryos were 33.7%, 26.9% and 21.55%, respectively. Consequently, the total efficiency from anthers to shoots of ‘Danxia’ was 2.33%, followed by ‘Gala’, ‘Fuji’, ‘Senshu’, ‘SD’ and ‘ASP’, which had efficiencies of 0.35%, 0.30%, 0.30%, 0.27% and 0.25%, respectively.