App Preview Video for the App Store: Specs, Sizes, Guidelines and Examples

An app preview is a short video on your App Store product page, made from screen recordings of your app. Apple accepts up to three per device size and language, each 15 to 30 seconds long and no larger than 500 MB, as .mov, .m4v or .mp4 files in H.264, or as .mov files in ProRes 422 HQ, at no more than 30 frames per second. Those limits come from Apple's app preview specifications in App Store Connect Help, and every number on this page was read from Apple's own pages on October 21, 2026 unless a line says otherwise.

For an iPhone app, the one size to know is 886 x 1920 pixels in portrait, or 1920 x 886 in landscape. Apple accepts that single resolution for every iPhone with Face ID or Dynamic Island, from the iPhone X to the iPhone 18 Pro Max and the iPhone Duo. For iPad, export 1200 x 1600 pixels in portrait or 1600 x 1200 in landscape. These are video sizes, not screen sizes, which is why they are much smaller than the image sizes in our App Store screenshot sizes guide.

Previews are optional. When you add one, Apple's guide to the product page says it autoplays with the sound muted as soon as someone opens your page, and Apple's app previews page says previews also autoplay in search results and can be used in Apple Ads. Because almost everyone meets the video in silence, it has to make sense with captions alone, and the first few seconds do most of the work.

The sections below go through each spec in detail, the accepted resolution for every device, Apple's rules, how to record and convert a clip so App Store Connect takes it, a 30 second shot plan you can copy, ten previews from live App Store pages, what published tests say about conversion, the errors that stop uploads, and a checklist to run before you submit.

Apple's app previews page describes a preview as a short video that demonstrates the features, functions and interface of your app with footage captured on the device. It is a demo, not a commercial, and App Review checks it against the same accurate metadata rules as your screenshots. That one idea explains most of the rules further down: if a shot could not come from the app's own screen, it probably does not belong in the preview.

A preview can appear in four places. On the product page it takes the first slots of the media row, ahead of every screenshot. In search results, Apple's App Store search page says your rating and up to three screenshots or app previews may show, depending on the platform and the orientation of your media. In Apple Ads, Apple says previews can be used in your ads. And the poster frame, a still you choose from the video, is shown during app install and whenever the video is not playing.

Autoplay is the part that changes how you should edit. Apple's product page guide says previews autoplay with muted audio when people view your page, so the first few seconds need to be visually compelling, and that the poster frame appears whenever a video does not autoplay. People can turn autoplay off. The Mac App Store settings page lists a Video Autoplay option that plays app preview videos with the sound off, and Apple's app previews page says that someone who has switched video autoplay off in their App Store settings sees the poster frame instead. For that viewer, the poster frame is the whole preview.

Aspect ratio decides where the video sits. If your screenshots are portrait and your preview is landscape, or the other way round, Apple moves the preview out of the top media row and into the A Closer Look section further down the page. For most apps that people hold upright, a portrait preview that matches the screenshots keeps the video in the most visible spot.

One more distinction is new in 2026. Since iOS 27 and iPadOS 27, Apple also offers creative assets: images and videos for the product page header and for search results that, unlike previews, do not have to show the app in use. They have their own sizes and rules, compared in a table near the end of this page. The screenshot side of the product page is covered in our App Store screenshot examples.

No app preview size is required. Screenshots have required sizes; previews do not, and you can ship an app with none. If you do add one, upload it for the largest display you support and let App Store Connect fill in the rest. Apple's specifications say that when your interface is the same across device sizes and localizations, you only need to provide the highest resolution, and it scales down to smaller devices.

For iPhone, that means one 886 x 1920 file in the Dynamic Island large display slot. The fallback notes in the table above form a chain: the Face ID large group borrows the Dynamic Island large preview, the Dynamic Island medium group borrows the Face ID large one, the Face ID medium group borrows the Dynamic Island medium one, and so on down to the 4 inch phones. Apple lists no fallback for the iPhone Duo, so if your app supports it, add the same 886 x 1920 file to that slot as well.

The older Home Button phones are the one soft spot. Their accepted files are 16:9 (1080 x 1920 and 750 x 1334), while the modern iPhone file is closer to 19.5:9. Apple says those phones fall back to a scaled copy of the Face ID medium preview but does not say how it fits a taller video into a shorter shape. If iPhone 8 and SE owners matter to your audience, export a separate 1080 x 1920 cut and check it under View All Sizes in Media Manager, which Apple's guide to managing App Store assets describes as the place to manage scaled previews for each device size.

For iPad, one 1200 x 1600 file in the 13 inch slot covers the 12.9, 11 and 10.5 inch groups, and the 9.7 inch group falls back to the 10.5 inch version. A recording from a 13 inch iPad at 2064 x 2752 has exactly the 3:4 shape of the accepted file, so it only needs scaling. A recording from an 11 inch iPad at 1668 x 2388 is a little narrower than 3:4, so it needs a small crop. Derived from the device sizes Apple lists: 1668 divided by 2388 is about 0.70, against 0.75 for the accepted file.

Two more rules from the same page are worth knowing before you upload. You can add specific, unscaled previews for any device size or language instead of relying on scaling. And if a localized preview is missing, App Store Connect shows the preview in the next best available language. Removing a preview works the other way: Apple's assets guide says that when you delete one, it is also removed from every other display size that used a scaled copy of it.

On orientation, iOS previews can be portrait or landscape, and a landscape preview rotates to landscape when it plays. Choose the orientation people actually use the app in. A game played sideways should be previewed sideways, as Alto's Odyssey does in the examples below, while a to do app or a banking app belongs in portrait, next to portrait screenshots.

If you would rather understand the command than paste it, here it is in plain words. The scale and crop pair fills the 886 x 1920 frame without stretching the picture or adding black bars, trimming whatever sticks out. Setsar=1 keeps the pixels square. Fps=30 forces a constant 30 frames per second, which matters because a variable rate can spike above 30 even when the average is lower. Libx264 with the high profile at level 4.0 and a bit rate of 11 Mbps lands inside Apple's H.264 limits. The audio settings write a 256 kbps stereo AAC track, and the anullsrc input supplies silence when the recording has no sound.

Why add silence at all? Apple's specifications describe the audio track but do not say a silent file is refused. Developers say it is: in an Apple Developer Forums thread from October 2021, a developer got the error Your app preview contains unsupported or corrupted audio for a preview with no audio, and a later reply fixed it by adding audio in iMovie. iOS developer Sarun Wongpatcharapakorn reaches the same conclusion and notes that simctl recordings have no audio track. A silent track costs nothing, so include one.

If you prefer an editor, iMovie on the Mac has a project type made for this. Apple's iMovie guide says to choose File, then New App Preview, which opens an empty app preview timeline; you edit it like any other project, except that some titles and transitions are not available and backgrounds must be solid colors. iMovie is free on the Mac App Store, at version 10.4.5 as of September 29, 2026. Final Cut Pro offers export presets and custom export settings, including ProRes; if its output is not exactly an accepted size, run it through the conversion command above.

Whatever you export from, check the file with the ffprobe line above before you upload. Editors that target social media sometimes produce files App Store Connect will not process: in a July 2023 forum thread, a developer whose upload sat in processing found the cause was the video editor, CapCut, and fixed it by converting the files again with other software. If an export misbehaves, run it through the ffmpeg command or through HandBrake, a free and open source converter, and try again.

A preview has one job: show what the app does, quickly, to someone who is not listening. Apple's asset best practices put it in four rules. Start strong, leading with your value or your most compelling feature. Pace the cuts so people have time to take in each scene, and avoid quick cuts and fast moving visuals that are hard to follow. Make the video loop smoothly, because it autoplays and repeats. And make it work silently first, since audio is muted by default in most cases.

The first three seconds carry the most weight. Someone scrolling search results sees the preview start playing on its own, with no sound and no context, and decides in a moment whether to stop. Open on the screen that explains the app best, ideally the result rather than the setup: the finished budget, the edited photo, the race in progress. Logos, splash screens and sign in screens waste those seconds.

Captions do the talking. Put one short line on every scene, three to six words, in large type near the middle of the frame where nothing will cover it, and leave each one up for at least two seconds. Write the line as the benefit in the words a customer would search for, such as Track every expense, not as a feature name. Apple asks that text be legible, easy to understand and on screen long enough to read.

Use the full length if you have something to show. Fifteen seconds is the minimum and 30 the maximum, and seven of the ten live previews we checked for this page run the full 30. A tight 20 second cut beats a padded 30, though, because the video loops: a slow middle section is what people sit through on the second pass.

Plan the ending as the beginning of the next loop. Close on an end frame with the app name and one line about what it does, plus any required disclosure about purchases or login, then cut back to a frame that matches the opening so the loop feels intended. If you make more than one preview, Apple's app previews page suggests a story across them: the first gives an overview, and each of the others shows something new.

Sound is optional. Apple suggests a single music track throughout for continuity, sound effects from your own interface to reinforce actions, and a clean, professionally recorded voiceover if you use one. Treat all of it as something only a few viewers will hear, and make sure every track is licensed for marketing use.

Previews belong to a language. You can upload up to three for each language your app supports, and Apple's specifications say that if a localized preview is missing, the App Store shows the preview in the next best available language. Apple's localization guide adds that when you add a language, its screenshots and most other properties start as copies of the primary language until you replace them.

A localized preview means three things: captions in the local language, the app's interface recorded in that language, and content that fits the market, such as local names and a sensible currency in the footage. The cheapest way to get there is to switch the device language, record the same scenes again, and keep your captions on their own layer in the editor so you can swap the text without rebuilding the video. Start with the two or three storefronts that bring the most downloads rather than all of them.

Custom product pages are where a second or third preview earns its keep. Apple's custom product pages overview says you can publish up to 70 additional versions of your product page, each with its own screenshots, promotional text and app previews, a unique URL, and optional keywords that let the page appear in search. They also work as destinations for Apple Ads. Apple reports that developers see a 2.5 percentage point increase in conversion rate on average when they send people to a custom product page, a 156% increase over the 1.6% average on default pages. That figure is for custom product pages as a whole, not for previews alone.

The practical move is to make the preview match the reason someone arrived. An ad about receipts should land on a page whose preview opens on scanning a receipt. Our iOS app marketing guide covers custom product pages, Apple Ads and the rest of the product page in depth, and the App Store campaign link generator makes the tracked links that show which page each channel sends traffic to.

To test a preview rather than guess, use product page optimization. Apple's product page optimization page says you can test up to three alternate versions of your page against the original, with different icons, screenshots and app previews, for up to 90 days, shown to a random share of people on iOS and iPadOS 15 or later. Tests without an alternate icon can be submitted for review without a new app version, which makes a preview test cheap to run.

Sometimes, and the only number that settles it is your own. The published tests point in both directions, many are years old, and several come from companies that sell testing tools. Here is what each one actually says, with its date and who ran it.

Apple's own example argues for caution. On its product page optimization page, Apple presents a developer story from Simply Piano. The hypothesis was that adding an app preview as the first asset would convert better than screenshots alone. After a 12 day test with one treatment, Apple reports that the page without the preview video performed better, with a 3% difference in conversion rate at 100% confidence. Apple does not give the year of the test.

A vendor case study points the other way. SplitMetrics' case study on Prequel, a photo and video editing app, says the team tested replacing its video with screenshots and found the page performed worse without the video: visitors were less likely to stay, scroll the screenshots or interact. A later test of a new poster frame, with a caption saying that Prequel is a photo and video editor, is reported as an improvement of around 75%, but the page does not name the metric, the sample size or the date, and SplitMetrics sells the testing tool used.

The older figures need the most care. In August 2017, the agency AppAgent published its own tests on Phiture's ASO Stack blog: across iOS tests with nearly 9,000 visitors, only 0.5% watched any video, and the article puts the average play rate at 2%. Those tests predate autoplay. As Apptamin's guide to iOS 11 app previews explains, before iOS 11 people had to tap play on the poster frame, and from iOS 11 previews autoplay muted. The same guide reports Storemaven estimates from before iOS 11 of a 20 to 35% conversion lift from a video and of video watchers being three times more likely to install. They are vendor numbers from a store that no longer works that way, so treat them as history.

What follows from all this is practical. A preview tends to help when it shows something screenshots cannot: motion, gameplay, a workflow that is faster than it sounds. It can hurt when it delays the message, opens on a logo, or pushes strong screenshots out of the first slots in search results. If your page gets enough traffic, run a product page optimization test with one treatment that has the preview and one that does not, or with two poster frames, and keep whichever wins.

Spreadcast does not make App Store preview videos, and it does not upload anything to App Store Connect. Everything above is work you do with Apple's tools or an editor. The preview has a narrow job: it sells the app to people who are already on your product page or in search results.

Spreadcast works on the other side of the store, for people who are not looking at your page today. You paste your App Store link once at the start page, and Spreadcast checks the listing every day. When a new version ships, it designs a post about the update with your real app screenshots in an iPhone frame, in your brand colors and fonts, writes the caption for each network, and publishes it to Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, Pinterest, Bluesky, Mastodon, Telegram and Discord, plus YouTube for video posts, on full autopilot or after your one tap approval. It also posts when the app reaches a rating milestone. It watches the App Store only, not Google Play.

The two fit together. When you ship a release big enough to record a new preview, the same update is worth telling your followers about, and Spreadcast handles that post without another round of design work. The free plan makes 3 posts for you to download; Pro, at $29 a month, publishes for you. The details are on the pricing page. The footage you recorded for the preview is good raw material for social video too: our guide to promoting an app on TikTok covers that format, and the iPhone mockup generator puts stills in a device frame, which is fine on social even though it is not allowed in the preview itself. For the wider picture of the product page, see our guide to App Store optimization.