In-app events, explained for apps that aren’t games.

Both stores quietly grew a second listing slot: a card with its own artwork, its own copy and its own review queue, which appears alongside your screenshots and then expires. Almost every guide written about it assumes you make a match-three game. You don’t have to.

What the slot actually is

Apple calls it an in-app event. It’s a time-boxed thing happening inside your app — a major update, a premiere, a limited-time challenge — that you describe on the App Store with a name, two descriptions, a 16:9 card, a badge and a deep link. It lives on your product page for the run of the event and then disappears. Google’s equivalent is promotional content (you’ll also see it called LiveOps), split into three types: offers, time-limited events and major updates.

The important structural fact about both: they ship independently of your binary. Apple reviews events separately from app versions, so an event goes out without a build, without a version bump and without waiting for the rest of your release to be ready. That makes the slot usable at a cadence a solo developer can actually sustain.

Where the card shows up

On Apple’s side, published events appear in three places: your product page, search results when someone searches your app or the event, and the editorially curated and personalised recommendations on the Today, Games and Apps tabs. The detail worth building a strategy around is the product-page placement — for people who have already downloaded your app, event cards render above your screenshots. That’s the one surface on the App Store aimed squarely at lapsed users, and it’s the only one you control without paying for ads.

Users can also tap a notify control on the event card to be pinged by the App Store when your event starts, which then opens your deep link. It’s a push notification you can send to people who haven’t opted in to your push notifications.

On Google Play, promotional content can surface in the Apps or Games tab, the Events tab (available in a limited set of countries), search results, and your store listing page.

The specs, so you don’t discover them at 11pm

Apple’s limits are tight and worth knowing before you write anything:

Event name 30 characters, title case. Short description 50 characters. Long description 120 characters. The event card is 16:9, 1920×1080 up to 3840×2160, image or video; the event details page takes a 9:16 asset at 1080×1920 up to 2160×3840. An event runs up to 31 days and can be promoted up to 14 days before it starts. You can have 15 approved events in App Store Connect and 10 published on the store at once. Every event carries one of seven badges: Challenge, Competition, Live Event, Major Update, New Season, Premiere, Special Event.

Google’s primary image is 1920×1080, 16:9, JPG or 24-bit PNG. The tagline caps at 80 characters — but the Spotlight format cuts that to 48 for single-byte languages and 23 for double-byte ones, so write to 48 if you want the widest placement. The description allows up to 500 characters and Google recommends at least 100. Keep critical visual elements inside the safe zone: 15% off the top, 20% off the bottom, 10% on each side, because the image gets cropped on other form factors.

The eligibility catch on Play

Here’s the part that stops most non-game developers: Google’s promotional content is open to all games, but apps only qualify if they meet the criteria for Premium growth tools. Apple has no such split — in-app events are open to apps and games alike. If you ship an app rather than a game, check Play Console first; you may find the slot exists for you on one store and not the other, and the honest answer is to run it where you can rather than skipping both.

What counts as an event when your app has no seasons

The rejection reason here is almost never technical. Google’s guidelines are blunt about it: general service descriptions and evergreen programmes are not promotional content, and neither is cramming several ongoing perks into one card. “Enjoy our daily flash sales” is the example they give of what gets refused. Apple’s equivalent rule is that the metadata must portray the event, not the app in general.

So the test is: would this still be true in three months? If yes, it isn’t an event. Things that pass the test for ordinary apps:

A feature launch with a date — the week you ship offline mode, shared libraries, the new export engine. A genuine limited-time offer, if you run one. A content drop: new templates, new packs, a new integration going live. A one-off live moment — an AMA, a workshop, a community challenge with an end date. A cross-app collaboration. Tax season, term start, the annual planning rush — whatever your app’s calendar peak actually is.

And an underrated one: the major-update badge on a release you were shipping anyway. You are already writing release notes nobody reads. The same work, restructured as an event, buys a card on your product page for up to a month.

The copy rules that get submissions bounced

Both stores treat this surface as editorial, not advertising, and police it accordingly. Google forbids text on the image entirely — including your logo, slogan, and the event’s own name — because the tagline is supposed to carry the message. No CTA text or button-like elements in the artwork. No words in all caps (“FREE”, “NOW”). No “Install now!” in the tagline. No line breaks or bullet lists in either field. Don’t repeat the same sentence across tagline and description.

Apple’s rules run parallel: no pricing in the metadata (it varies by region), no unverifiable superlatives like “best” or “#1”, and text and logos kept out of the media where possible. Apple also expects you to have tested the deep link before submission, and to avoid URL shorteners and redirect chains in it.

The division of labour in the copy is the same on both stores, and it’s the thing to internalise: the tagline says what the moment is, the description says why the user should care and exactly how to take part. If your description doesn’t explain how to participate — including any eligibility requirement — that alone is a documented rejection reason on Play.

The scheduling trap

Play requires the promotion and the in-app moment to run at the same time, and users must be able to find the thing easily on opening the app. A card advertising a feature that’s still in review is a failed submission, not an early start. Google also asks for submissions more than 24 hours before the start date so there’s time to review. Apple’s pre-promotion window is the clean way to handle anticipation: publish up to 14 days early and point the deep link at a landing screen or onboarding until the event opens.

Worth it?

For an indie app, the honest calculation is that this is one of the few free, repeatable ways to put something new on your listing between releases — and the only one that reaches people who already deleted you. The cost is two pieces of artwork and about 200 characters of copy per event. If you ship monthly, that’s a card on your product page most of the year.

The artwork is the part that stalls people, because the cropping rules make a screenshot export useless and the no-text rules make a marketing banner useless. ShotCanvas renders the same design to arbitrary pixel dimensions, so a 16:9 event card and a 9:16 details page can come out of one composition instead of two design sessions.