App promo video maker

The two rulebooks

One store enforces fifteen to thirty seconds outright and rejects anything outside it, allows up to three previews per localisation per device family, defaults the poster frame to the five second mark, and requires the preview be made of screen captures of the app itself, which rules out hands, devices held by people and over the shoulder angles. The other takes a single video entered as a public or unlisted link, requires the first ten seconds to be actual in-app experience and at least eighty percent of the runtime to be representative, and autoplays only the first thirty seconds.

The five second frame has to stand alone

Because one store's poster frame defaults to five seconds in, whatever is on screen at that moment is the still image many people will judge the app on. That is a design constraint, not a detail. It means the beat at five seconds should be a clean, readable screen showing the app doing its most valuable thing, not a transition, not a wipe, and definitely not a logo.

Not the onboarding, and not the splash

Both stores say a version of this. One requires the app be shown in use rather than as title art, a login page or a splash screen. The other explicitly wants real in-app experience up front. So the sign up flow, the permissions prompts and the welcome carousel are all the wrong opening even though they are chronologically first. Open on the screen that shows the value and leave onboarding out entirely.

The things neither store will take

Prices and currency, seasonal references, names or imagery of rival mobile platforms and marketplaces, unlicensed music, film or character content including in the background, and metadata that would not pass a four plus age rating even for an app rated higher. The other store separately bans user testimonials, claims about store performance or ranking, promotional wording and install now style calls to action. That list rules out most of what a paid acquisition creative is made of, which is why store previews and paid ads are two different edits.

How it works, in three steps

1. Step 1

   Capture the app screens yourself

   Screenshots of the app in use are the material. One store accepts only captures of the app, so a filmed phone in a hand is not an option there.

2. Step 2

   Build to the shorter window

   Short length here gives three to six scenes, which at promo pacing lands inside the fifteen to thirty second range one store enforces.

3. Step 3

   Check what is on screen at five seconds

   Scrub the preview to the five second mark and look at the frame. That is the poster image, and it should read as a still.

The full walkthrough with screenshots is in the guide Make a promo video with AI voiceover.

Limits worth knowing

• Exports are 30 frames a second at 1920 by 1080 or 1080 by 1920, or double that on the Ultra option.
• There is no device frame mockup wrapper applied automatically. Some scene layouts draw a phone frame, and others show the screenshot full bleed.
• Captions are burned in, and store previews with baked text still have to pass the store's own metadata rules.
• This produces one video. Localised previews per language mean building one per language, since narration and on-screen copy are both written in the language you set.

Questions people ask

Related pages