App preview videos: specs and a workable structure

An app preview is the short video that autoplays at the top of your App Store product page. Apple limits it to captured or rendered footage of your app in use, between 15 and 30 seconds, and it plays muted by default on many surfaces. Those three constraints — short, in-app, silent — decide almost everything about how you should cut it.

The hard limits

Previews run 15 to 30 seconds. You can upload up to three per localization and per display size, and the first one is the one that autoplays. Resolution follows the same display classes as screenshots, portrait or landscape, typically at 30 fps. Audio is optional but must not be the only way to understand what is happening, because most viewers never hear it. Anything that is not your app on screen — talking heads, stock footage, a person holding a phone — is outside what Apple accepts for a preview, though it is fine in marketing videos elsewhere.

Structure for a muted viewer

Open on the outcome, not the login screen. The first two seconds should show the app doing the thing that makes it worth downloading, because that is all an autoplaying, muted, half-scrolled-past preview reliably delivers. Then show two or three concrete actions, each with a short caption burned into the frame, and close on the app's identity — icon, name, one line. Caption text should be readable at thumbnail size: think six words, not a sentence.

Rendering it without a camera

You do not need to film a device. Record the screen, drop the recording onto a 3D device model, animate the camera between a couple of framings and export at your target resolution. That gives you a preview with real motion and depth that is still, strictly speaking, footage of your app. Keep the camera moves slow and few — one move per shot, ending still — because rapid orbiting reads as an ad and hides the interface you are trying to show.