In-App Events: the App Store slot most apps leave empty.
Screenshots, subtitle, keywords — every listing lever developers talk about lives inside your binary's App Review cycle. In-App Events don't. It's a separate submission, reviewed on its own timeline, that puts a card into search results and onto your product page without touching your build. Most apps that have been live for months have never filed one. Here's what it actually is, the exact numbers Apple enforces, and what Google Play offers instead.
What you're actually submitting
An In-App Event is a card tied to something real happening inside your app — a new season, a time-limited challenge, a live tournament, a launch sale — not a marketing banner invented for the occasion. It's built from a handful of fields in App Store Connect: an internal reference name (up to 64 characters, never shown to users), the event name itself (up to 30 characters, title case, the actual name of the thing rather than a call to action), a short description (up to 50 characters, shown on the card), and a longer description (up to 120 characters, shown on the event's own details page). You also pick one image or video for the card and one for the details page, and optionally flag whether the event requires an in-app purchase or subscription.
The numbers Apple actually enforces
An event has to run at least 15 minutes and can run at most 31 days start to end. You can publish it up to 14 days ahead of its start date, which is how "coming soon" cards exist. The card image is 16:9, minimum 1920×1080 and maximum 3840×2160; the details-page image is 9:16, minimum 1080×1920 and maximum 2160×3840 (video versions use the same ratios and resolutions). You choose one badge from seven — Live Event, Premiere, Challenge, Competition, New Season, Major Update, or Special Event — and Apple is explicit that the badge has to match what's actually happening: a routine bug-fix update labeled Major Update, or a scheduled sale labeled Live Event, gets pushed back in review.
There are also ceilings on volume: up to 10 events published at once per app, up to 15 approved and sitting in App Store Connect at once, and up to 10 with overlapping start windows. If you localize an event's start time by region, every regional start has to land within 48 hours of the others — you can't run "launch week" in Tokyo a month before Toronto.
Where it actually shows up
Two placements are guaranteed for any published event: your own product page, which lists every event you currently have live, and search results when someone looks up your app. The Today, Games, and Apps tab placements are editorial — Apple's team curates what runs there, and personalized recommendations decide who sees it — so that upside depends on the card being genuinely good, not just filed correctly. Treat the guaranteed placements as the floor and the editorial ones as the reason to make the card worth curating.
A separate review lane from your binary
This is the part that makes it worth knowing about even if you never use it: the submission goes through App Review on its own track, independent of whatever build is currently live. You don't wait for your next release to get a visibility bump for a sale, a milestone, or a content drop — you file the event against the app that's already in the store. If you're sitting on a real, time-boxed reason for someone to open your app this week, an event is the fastest lever available that doesn't touch your codebase.
What Google Play gives you instead
Play doesn't have a literal clone of In-App Events, but "Promotional content" is the closest match: it appears on your store listing by default, and can also surface on the Apps or Games tab, a dedicated Events tab, and in search. The content types are narrower and named differently — offers (discounts, free rewards, trial extensions), features and announcements for significant updates, and pre-registration updates — but the underlying idea is the same free visibility surface. Separately, Play's custom store listings (up to 50 per app) let you swap text and creative by country, campaign, or Play Search keyword without changing the default listing for everyone; that's the closer cousin to Apple's Custom Product Pages than to In-App Events, and worth knowing as a second lever on that side.
The card is a design problem, not a checkbox
Once the fields are filled in, the thing that decides whether an event gets curated — and whether a searcher taps it — is the card image. It's judged exactly like a screenshot: someone sees it before they read a word, and a stretched logo on a busy background at 3840×2160 reads as an afterthought. The same rules that make a screenshot set convert apply here — state the moment in a few words, keep the safe area clean, match the visual system of your listing so the card doesn't feel bolted on. If you're already building your screenshot set in ShotCanvas, the event card is the same job at a different aspect ratio, not a separate design exercise.