How to make an App Store preview video

Apple wants an app preview to be the app, and nothing else. Their guidance is that previews are built from “footage captured on device”, and that a preview must show only content from within the app itself — no filming someone using a phone, no over-the-shoulder angles, no fingers on the glass.

Everything else on this page assumes a straight screen recording of your app, which is the only kind of footage that clears the rule above.

These are validated at upload. App Store Connect will reject a file that misses any of them, and it will not always tell you which one you missed.

• Length: 15 to 30 seconds. Not 14, not 31.
• Number: up to three previews per localisation.
• File size: 500 MB maximum.
• Video: H.264, progressive, up to High Profile Level 4.0, 30 fps maximum, with a target bitrate of 10–12 Mbps. ProRes 422 HQ is also accepted, at roughly 220 Mbps, .mov only.
• Container: .mov, .m4v or .mp4 for H.264.
• Audio: stereo, 256 kbps AAC, at 44.1 or 48 kHz, with every track enabled.
• Poster frame: taken from 5 seconds in by default — you can move it, and you should.

The resolutions are exact, and they are not the same as your device's screen resolution or your screenshot sizes:

The one to remember is 886 × 1920. Every current iPhone display size — 6.9″ down to 6.1″ — takes that same file, so a single export covers all of them.

1. 1

   Record on real hardware. Apple's wording is “captured on device”, and a recording made on an actual iPhone is unambiguously inside that. Plug the phone into a Mac, open QuickTime Player, choose File → New Movie Recording, and pick the iPhone as the camera source. You get a clean, full-resolution capture with no red recording indicator in the status bar — which the built-in iOS screen recorder leaves in every frame.

2. 2

   Rehearse the flow before you hit record. Thirty seconds is less than it sounds. Pick one thing your app does, show it end to end, and let the interface be legible — taps that land faster than a viewer can follow read as a glitch, not as speed. Turn on Do Not Disturb, and put the battery at something that isn't 3%.

3. 3

   Trim it to length. Anything from QuickTime to iMovie will do this. If you'd rather do it without opening an editor, this takes 25 seconds starting 3 seconds in, without re-encoding:

   ffmpeg -ss 3 -i recording.mov -t 25 -c copy trimmed.mov

A modern iPhone records at something like 1290 × 2796. Apple wants 886 × 1920. The aspect ratio is near enough identical that a straight scale is all it takes — this produces a file that satisfies every requirement above, including a silent stereo track for the case where your recording has no audio at all:

ffmpeg -i trimmed.mov \
  -f lavfi -i anullsrc=channel_layout=stereo:sample_rate=48000 \
  -shortest -map 0:v:0 -map 1:a:0 \
  -vf "scale=886:1920:force_original_aspect_ratio=decrease,\
pad=886:1920:(ow-iw)/2:(oh-ih)/2:color=black,fps=30" \
  -c:v libx264 -profile:v high -level:v 4.0 \
  -b:v 11M -maxrate 12M -bufsize 24M -pix_fmt yuv420p \
  -c:a aac -b:a 256k -ar 48000 -ac 2 \
  preview.mp4

If your recording already has audio you want to keep, drop the -f lavfi, -shortest and both -map lines — the rest of the command re-encodes the existing track to Apple's spec on its own.

1. 1

   In App Store Connect, open your app, then the version you're preparing, and scroll to the previews and screenshots section.

2. 2

   Pick the display size the file was made for. Upload the 886 × 1920 file under the largest iPhone size; the same file is valid for the other current sizes.

3. 3

   Set the poster frame. It defaults to 5 seconds in, which is usually a frame mid-transition. Move it to something that reads as a still image, because that is what most people see.

4. 4

   Repeat for each localisation you ship. Previews are per-language, and a preview full of English text on a German listing is a review note waiting to happen.

The constraints above exist because the App Store wants every listing to look like the App Store. Nowhere else does. On your own landing page, on X or Product Hunt, in an ad, the plain screen recording that passes review looks like a bug report — and the video with the device in it is the one that stops a scroll.

That is the video Genvap makes. You bring the same recording you just cut for the App Store; it comes back as a 3D phone moving through a scene you control, with camera moves, a backdrop and text overlays, rendered in your browser. Your recording never leaves your machine.

• Set the frame to whatever the destination wants — 9:16 for Reels and TikTok, 16:9 for YouTube and your site's hero, 1:1 for a feed post.
• Chain camera moves — zoom, spin, pan, tilt — instead of cutting between takes.
• Add text overlays for the two or three things the footage doesn't say on its own.
• Export watermark-free for $4.99 a video, once. There's nothing to cancel and the file is yours.

The resolutions, durations and codec settings are Apple's, from App Preview Specifications in App Store Connect Help, and the content rules are from App Previews on developer.apple.com. Both were checked on 12 August 2026. Apple adds display sizes most autumns, so check the first link before an important upload rather than trusting this table alone.