Building the next great iPhone application takes more than a great user experience. Before you can start seeing downloads and reviews pour in, you need to connect with audiences and show them why they need your application on their phones.
But getting noticed isn’t as straightforward as we’d all hope. With more than 1.76 million apps and 460,000 games in the Apple App Store, having marketing assets that get and keep your audience’s attention is critical.
In this post, we will walk through what marketing assets you need to submit your application to the Apple App Store—and a few tips I’ve learned along the way.
What Assets Do You Need for the Apple App Store?
- App icon. Sure, a lot goes into a mobile application. But the memorable ones all have one thing in common—an unforgettable icon. The icon is the visual representation of your app. Think of the greats, from Evernote’s elephant to Instagram’s first icon inspired by the classic Polaroid camera. The icon needs to stand out on a crowded home screen.
- Screenshots. Screenshots aren’t restricted to just screens from your application or game. Today, screenshots are rich images with text and other information to market your application. One of the most significant trends over the last few years is creating a carousel of screenshots to tell a story as potential users swipe through. I use Figma templates to help create carousels—it's a massive time saver and produces great results.
- App previews. Showing is good, but telling is better. App previews are short videos that preview your app's interface, features, and usability.
- Promotional text. Your app’s tagline. It should be bold and easy to understand.
- App Store description. The description is your chance to get into the weeds of what your application or game offers your users. These don’t have to be dry, either. Look at what our friends at Slack do with their application update descriptions.
- Keywords. SEO isn’t just for websites. Ensure you identify and provide any relevant keywords that can help increase your app's discoverability within the App Store search.
4 Tips for App Store Optimized Graphics and Videos
Between creating graphics for our applications and our client’s applications, we've learned that while Apple’s guidelines are readily available, a few tips and tricks are not covered. Here are four tips to help you get your assets approved quickly.
- Transparency. Graphics for the Apple App Store cannot be transparent—at all. Make sure you have the transparency option turned off or disabled when you’re exporting your images. Even one transparent pixel will cause the image to be rejected.
- Device sizes. You must upload assets for two different device screen sizes, a 6.7-inch display and a 5.5-inch display. The trick here is these are two different aspect ratios. Once uploaded and approved, the App Store will show the appropriate set for the various device screen sizes, from the 4.7-inch display of the iPhone SE to the 6.7-inch display on the iPhone 15 Pro Max.
- Video Codecs. App Store videos have to be processed at a certain codec level. H.264 formatted videos need to use 256kbps AAC, while ProRes 422 videos should use PCM or 256kbps AAC. I use Adobe Media Encoder to ensure the videos are rendered correctly.
- Processing time. This one is important—just because you’ve uploaded assets doesn’t mean they’re approved. You should build time into your launch process to come back and check asset status in case you need to make any changes.
Understanding the guidelines and submitting the correctly formatted assets the first time can help you avoid delays in getting your application approved. Need help getting your application ready for launch? Our team has over a decade of experience designing and developing applications for iOS and Android devices. Get in contact with us today.
