Mobile App Promo Video: Formats, Length and Aspect Ratios

You have the take. The app does the thing, the motion is clean, and the file on your desktop is a portrait MP4 straight out of the Simulator. Now the errand starts: the App Store wants one shape, Google Play does not want a file at all, Product Hunt wants a YouTube link, and the launch post wants something that reads at thumbnail size in a muted feed.

A mobile app promo video is not one file. It is a delivery set cut from one master, and almost every guide on this topic stops at "keep it short" without printing a single number you could fail against. Two of these destinations will reject a file that misses the spec. The rest accept anything and quietly under-perform, which is worse, because nothing tells you.

This page is the numbers. Everything below was checked against the platform's own documentation on 21 August 2026, and where a figure was circulating without a source, it is named and left out.

The short answer

A mobile app promo video is a short video that sells an app across the App Store, Google Play, a launch post and social. Cut one 15 to 30 second portrait master, then export per surface: 886 x 1920 for Apple, a YouTube link for Google Play and Product Hunt, and 1080 x 1920 for social feeds.

One master, six deliverables

Think of the output as a render list rather than a video. One capture, one edit, six files, and the only decisions that matter are made before you cut.

master        1080 x 1920 portrait, 15–30s, captions burned in
app-store     886 x 1920 .mov/.mp4/.m4v      ← can be rejected
play-store    YouTube URL, first 30s carries ← rules on the URL, not the file
producthunt   YouTube URL + 1270 x 760 still + 240 x 240 thumbnail
social-9x16   1080 x 1920 for Reels, TikTok, Shorts
social-1x1    1080 x 1080 for the X and LinkedIn feed
landing       1920 x 1080 with the phone centred, muted autoplay loop

Two of those seven lines are gated by a reviewer or an uploader. The other five are not gated by anyone, which is exactly why they get ignored until the day of the launch.

The two surfaces that can reject your file

The App Store preview

Apple's app preview is the only one of these assets a third party can refuse. The rules are published and short.

Duration. Apple's own page states each preview "can be up to 30 seconds long." App Store Connect also enforces a 15-second floor, so a 14-second cut fails as firmly as a 31-second one.

Count. "You can have up to three app previews for each language your app supports."

Resolution. Previews are device-specific and uploaded per device slot. The current iPhone slot takes 886 x 1920 portrait, which is not the resolution any iPhone records at, so a raw capture always gets resampled on the way in. The full table by device class is in the App Store preview specs reference.

Content. Show only what is inside the app. Apple explicitly says: "Don't film people interacting with a device, such as an over-the-shoulder angle or fingers tapping the screen." Skip prices and seasonal references, both of which date the asset and both of which Apple names.

The poster frame. If a viewer has autoplay off, the poster frame is the whole asset. Apple notes that changing the poster frame on an already-approved preview requires submitting a new version, so pick it deliberately rather than accepting whatever the default lands on.

The App Store preview is the only asset on this list where a wrong number produces a rejection instead of a shrug. Build the master to Apple's bounds and every other surface is a crop.

The Google Play preview

Google Play does not take a video file. It takes a YouTube URL, and the constraints live on the link rather than on the encode.

The URL must point at a single video, not a playlist or a channel. The video must be public or unlisted, never private. Ads must be disabled, and the video must be embeddable. Google's listing guidance adds two content rules with numbers attached: "only the first 30 seconds autoplays," and at least 80% of the video should represent actual user experience.

That 80% rule is the one that catches launch films. A 60-second video with 20 seconds of logo animation and mood footage is out of spec on Play even though nothing about the file is wrong.

While you are in that form, the two adjacent assets have hard numbers too. The feature graphic is 1024 x 500, JPEG or 24-bit PNG with no alpha channel. Screenshots run 320px to 3840px on a side, minimum two and maximum eight per device type, and Play's promotional eligibility wants at least four at 1080p — 1920 x 1080 landscape or 1080 x 1920 portrait.

The surfaces that only bury you

Everything else accepts your file and then decides how many people see it. There is no error message.

Product Hunt. Video is a YouTube link only, per Product Hunt's own help centre — no MP4 upload exists. Gallery images are recommended at 1270 x 760, you need at least two, and the thumbnail should be square at 240 x 240. GIFs must be under 3MB and animate on hover rather than autoplaying, so the first frame is doing the work. The description field is 260 characters.

X and LinkedIn. Both feeds crop aggressively in the timeline and both autoplay muted. A 1:1 square holds more vertical pixels in-feed than a 16:9 landscape, and a 9:16 portrait gets letterboxed or cropped depending on the client. Square is the safe default for a feed post; portrait is for the story surfaces.

Reels, TikTok and Shorts. 1080 x 1920, and treat the bottom fifth of the frame as unusable — that is where the caption, handle and interface controls sit. Anything you put there is covered.

Your own landing page. No constraints, which is the trap. A muted autoplay loop on a landing page competes with the copy next to it, so this is the one place a 16:9 canvas with the phone centred usually beats a full-bleed portrait.

How long a mobile app promo video should be, per surface

There is no single correct length, and the guides that give one are averaging across surfaces that have nothing in common.

1. App Store preview: 15 to 30 seconds. Not a guideline. Outside that range, the upload fails.
2. Google Play: assume 30 seconds. Longer is allowed, but only the first 30 autoplay, so anything after that is a click-through, not a view.
3. Product Hunt: 45 to 75 seconds. You have a captive audience that arrived on purpose, and the video sits below the gallery rather than in front of it.
4. Feed posts: 15 to 20 seconds. The scroll is the competition, not another video.
5. Landing page: 20 to 40 seconds, looping. A loop with no clear start point can run longer than a linear cut because the viewer joins wherever they land.

The practical consequence is that the App Store bound is the tightest, so cut the master to 15 to 30 seconds first and let everything else be a trim. Going the other way — cutting a 60-second launch film down to 28 — always produces a video that feels like an abridgement, because it is one.

Aspect ratios, and why 9:16 is not the default

Vertical is the obvious answer for a phone app and it is wrong about a third of the time.

9:16 portrait (1080 x 1920). The device's own shape. Right for the App Store, Reels, TikTok, Shorts and stories. The whole frame is app, which is the point.

1:1 square (1080 x 1080). Right for the X and LinkedIn feed. The phone sits centred with room either side for a caption, a logo or a colour field, and it survives both the mobile and desktop crop of those timelines.

16:9 landscape (1920 x 1080). Right for YouTube, and therefore right for Google Play and Product Hunt, both of which take a YouTube URL. It is also the correct canvas for a landing-page hero, where a full-height portrait video pushes your headline off the screen.

Apple adds one recommendation that cuts against a habit: "We recommend capturing the native UI resolution rather than zooming in on the view." Capture at the device's real pixels and scale down at export. Scaling up from a smaller capture to hit 886 x 1920 is where soft text comes from, and text is the thing viewers read at a glance.

What the master has to contain to survive every crop

Six exports from one file only works if the file was built for it.

Keep the meaning inside a centre-safe box. Assume the outer 10% on every side is expendable. Anything you would be upset to lose — the headline, the tap target, the logo — lives inside the middle 80%.

Burn the captions in, and place them above the bottom fifth. Every one of these surfaces autoplays muted, and the platform's own interface occupies the bottom of the frame on the vertical ones. A caption at the true bottom edge is a caption nobody reads.

Put nothing important in the first half second. Feed players show a frame or two before they settle. Product Hunt's GIF thumbnail is literally frame one.

Do not bake a price or a date into the pixels. Apple names both as things to avoid, and beyond compliance it is the difference between an asset you re-render next quarter and one you re-shoot.

Keep a version of the timeline, not just the export. The reason six deliverables feels expensive is that most people produce them once, by hand, and then produce them again by hand after the next UI change.

What the right format will not fix

Correct dimensions get the file accepted. They do nothing about whether the video works.

A promo video fails for reasons no spec sheet can catch. It opens on a logo instead of the app. It shows six features instead of one. The flow it shows is not the flow the App Store keyword is about. Or the app on screen is doing something the viewer cannot identify, because nothing indicates where the taps landed. Apptamin's write-up of Apple's own WWDC examples makes exactly that point about UpTo, a one-take screen capture it describes as hard to follow for want of any visual cue about where the touches were going.

Format is also not positioning. If the video is being asked to explain a value proposition the App Store listing never states, no crop fixes that. And a preview is not a substitute for screenshots — Apple requires screenshots regardless, and there is a real argument about which of the two actually does the converting.

The scripting and shooting side of this — what to show, in what order, and how to get a clean take — is a separate job, covered in the app promo video how-to.

Rendering the set from one source

The reason this errand takes an afternoon is that the six deliverables are usually six manual exports, and a UI change invalidates all of them at once.

The alternative is to treat the output canvas as a parameter rather than an export dialog. Reely renders an iOS feature's reel from a spec file, and the canvas is one field in it — device-native portrait, 1080 x 1920, or 1920 x 1080 — so the same source produces each shape from one command rather than one timeline session per surface.

reely compose --spec launch.composition.json --format portrait  --output out/app-store.mp4
reely compose --spec launch.composition.json --format vertical  --output out/social-9x16.mp4
reely compose --spec launch.composition.json --format horizontal --output out/youtube.mp4

The honest limit: Reely covers Apple platforms. If your app ships on Android, the Play listing's video still comes from your own capture, and this page's Play numbers are the ones that matter. Reely is also free to create with and charges to export, so the spec side costs nothing to try.

Frequently asked questions

How long should a mobile app promo video be?

Between 15 and 30 seconds if it is going on the App Store, because App Store Connect enforces both ends of that range. For Google Play, assume 30 seconds, since Google's documentation states only the first 30 autoplay. Product Hunt tolerates 45 to 75 seconds. Cut the tightest version first and lengthen for the surfaces that allow it.

What aspect ratio should an app promo video be?

Portrait 9:16 at 1080 x 1920 for the App Store, TikTok, Reels and Shorts. Square 1:1 at 1080 x 1080 for X and LinkedIn feed posts, which crop hard in the timeline. Landscape 16:9 at 1920 x 1080 for YouTube, and therefore for Google Play and Product Hunt, since both take a YouTube URL rather than a file.

Can I use the same video for the App Store and Google Play?

You can use the same edit, but not the same asset. Apple takes an uploaded video file at a device-specific resolution, capped at 30 seconds with a 15-second floor. Google Play takes a public or unlisted YouTube URL with ads disabled, and expects at least 80% of the runtime to show real app usage.

Do app promo videos need sound?

Design as though there is none. Every surface listed here autoplays muted, and the App Store preview plays silently by default. Burn captions into the frame rather than relying on a voiceover, keep them out of the bottom fifth where platform interface elements sit, and treat music as something that improves the video for the minority who unmute.

Where to start

Open the master you already have and check it against three numbers: is it between 15 and 30 seconds, is the meaning inside the centre 80% of the frame, and are the captions burned in above the bottom fifth. Fix those three and the six exports become mechanical.

If you build iOS apps and the reason you keep putting this off is the capture session rather than the crops, Reely generates the footage and every canvas from one spec — free until you export.