App Preview Videos (iOS) and Promotional Videos (Play) sit alongside screenshots at the top of your listing. They autoplay (muted by default) on impression. A good preview video can lift install conversion meaningfully over screenshots alone, and a bad one — slow, voiceover-dependent, no clear value in the first seconds — can perform worse than no video at all. Be sceptical of the specific percentages quoted around the web for this: they come from vendor case studies on other people’s apps, and the only number that describes yours is the one you measure with Apple’s Product Page Optimization test. This guide covers the 15-30 second pattern.
App Store: - 15 to 30 seconds maximum - Up to 3 preview videos per device size - Portrait or landscape (consistent with screenshots) - 30fps, H.264, M4V/MP4/MOV - Footage must be recorded in-app (Apple guidelines) Google Play: - 30 seconds to 2 minutes - One promotional video - Hosted on YouTube (paste link) - More flexible content (marketing acceptable)
Users scroll past in 1-3 seconds.
Your first frame must communicate value instantly.
Bad: animated logo, "intro" sequence, brand reveal
Good: immediate value proposition with motion
- "Track 10x faster" caption + UI demo
- User pain → solution
- Visible result/outcome from the start
The hook is your single most important video decision.
App Store autoplays muted. Most users never enable sound. Design accordingly:
Feature-focused (weak): - "Use our dashboard" - "Try our advanced filters" Outcome-focused (strong): - "Find your hot leads in 3 taps" - "Close more deals this week" - "From mess to organised in 60 seconds" Users care about what THEY get, not what the app DOES.
0-3s: HOOK — value prop, motion, caption 3-15s: DEMO — show 2-3 key features in action 15-25s: PROOF — social proof, results, transformation 25-30s: CTA — final caption + branding For 30s videos, this is roughly 3-12s per section. Keep cuts fast — 1-2 seconds per shot maintains attention.
Each App Store locale can have its own preview videos. Translate captions, swap UI screenshots to localised versions, adjust pricing/currency callouts. Same principle as screenshots but multiplied — videos cost more to localise so prioritise top markets.
Counterintuitive but real: poorly-made videos hurt conversion. A/B test your video version vs no video (screenshots only). If videoless converts higher, redo the video or remove it. Measure: impression → product page → install. Video plays in the impression — its job is to lift product-page → install.
Every article about preview videos quotes a conversion lift, and the figures are remarkably consistent — which should make you more suspicious rather than less.
They come overwhelmingly from vendor case studies and agency blog posts, describing other people’s apps, in other categories, against other baselines. The apps where a video made no difference do not get written up, and neither do the ones where it made things worse. That is publication bias, not evidence, and it is the reason the range always sounds encouraging.
The direction of the effect is well supported and worth acting on: a good video helps, and a bad one can genuinely hurt, because it occupies the most valuable real estate on your listing. The magnitude is a fact about your app, and Apple hands you the instrument to measure it.
The instinctive first test is video A against video B. It is the wrong first test, and it skips the question that actually matters.
A video occupies the top of your listing and displaces the screenshots that would otherwise have been doing the work. If yours opens with a logo animation, carries its message in a voiceover nobody hears, and takes eight seconds to show anything useful, it is not neutral — it is actively spending your best slot on nothing, and the listing without it converts better.
The test order that saves money: 1. Video vs no video → does it help at all? 2. Hook A vs hook B → only if (1) said yes 3. Length, captions, order → only after (2)
Teams reliably skip step 1 because it feels like admitting the video might have been a waste. That is precisely why it is worth running: it is the one test whose result could save you from optimising something you should delete.
Section 3 says design for muted playback, and it is worth pressing on what that actually removes, because most video production instinctively builds around the channel that is missing.
A video whose message lives in the voiceover has, for nearly everyone who sees it, no message. They get moving pictures with no explanation, in the first three seconds, while deciding whether to keep scrolling. Music-led videos have the same problem in a more expensive form: the emotional beat that justified the edit is inaudible, so what remains is a sequence of cuts with no reason behind them.
So the discipline is simple and unforgiving: watch your own video with the sound off, and see whether it still says anything. If it does not, no amount of production value will save it, because that is the only way anybody will ever watch it.
What survives muting is captions and motion. Large text, on screen long enough to read on a phone at arm’s length, saying what the app does — and movement that shows a result appearing rather than a UI being navigated. Nobody wants to watch somebody use software. They want to see what happens after they do.
Section 2 is right that the first three seconds decide everything, and teams respond by agonising over the opening shot while leaving the rest of the video unchanged. That is treating a symptom.
If a viewer must understand your app in three seconds, then the app has to be describable in three seconds — and a great many preview videos fail because the product story being told is simply too big for the slot. A video attempting to cover five features has three seconds per feature and communicates none of them. A video showing one outcome, clearly, has three seconds to show one thing, which is achievable.
Too big for the format: "A complete CRM with pipelines, forecasting, email integration, team management and reporting" The right size: "See which lead to call next." [one screen, one number highlighted, one tap]
The narrowing is uncomfortable, because everything you cut is something somebody on the team fought for. But the video is not a feature list — the description is. The video has one job: make a stranger want to see more. Everything that does not serve that job is competing with the thing that does.
Preview videos attract disproportionate attention because they are the most fun asset to make and the easiest to spend money on. It is worth being honest about where they rank.
Highest return, lowest cost: 1. Title + subtitle say plainly what the app is 2. First 2-3 screenshots show the outcome, with captions 3. Rating and review volume (which conversion itself feeds) Then: 4. Preview video — tested against no video 5. Keyword field iteration 6. Localised assets per market
The reason for the order is that the screenshots are seen by everyone, in every placement, including the search results where the decision is usually made. The video is seen by people who have already stopped scrolling — a smaller and warmer audience.
So a team with weak screenshots and a beautiful video has spent its budget on the second decision while losing the first. Fix the visible slots, then make the video, then test whether the video earned its place. In that order, everything you build compounds; in any other order, some of it is decoration.
No. App Store autoplay is muted; most users won't enable sound. Voiceover is supplementary; captions are essential. Design as if silent first, then optionally add VO for users who enable sound.
Limited. Apple requires footage be recorded in-app (screen recording from device, not animated mockups). Some intro/outro framing allowed but main content must be real app footage.
More flexible — Play accepts YouTube-hosted marketing video including animated content, voiceover, etc. Still benefit from caption-driven design (silent autoplay common).
Agency quotes vary enormously by market and scope, so treat any range you are given as a starting point for negotiation rather than a benchmark. What matters more than the budget is whether the video is testable: an expensive video you never A/B test against no video is a worse investment than a cheap one you do. Cheaper options exist but quality varies. Localisation adds £500-£2,000 per market. Test ROI before scaling.
Not as predictions about your app. The figures that circulate come from vendor case studies and agency blog posts describing other people's apps, in other categories, against other baselines — and the ones showing no lift do not get written up. The direction is well-supported: a good video helps and a bad one can hurt. The magnitude is specific to your listing, and Apple gives you the tool to find out. Run a Product Page Optimization test with the video and without it, and use your own number.
Test it against no video at all, which is the comparison teams skip. The instinctive test is video A against video B, and it answers a question you have not yet earned the right to ask. A video that opens with a logo animation, relies on a voiceover nobody hears, and takes eight seconds to show anything useful genuinely can convert worse than the screenshots it displaced — because it occupies the most valuable slot on the listing and spends it badly. Establish that the video beats nothing before optimising which video.
Because it removes the channel most video production instinctively builds around. A video written with a voiceover carrying the message is a video whose message is simply absent for almost everyone who sees it — they get moving pictures with no explanation, in the first three seconds, while deciding whether to keep scrolling. So the message has to be carried visually: large on-screen captions, and motion that shows an outcome. If your video is incomprehensible with the sound off, it is incomprehensible, because that is how it will be watched.
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