TL;DR. An App Store in-app event is a scheduled card — image or video, a 30-character name, a 50-character short description — that Apple can surface in search results, on your product page, and in curated tabs. You can publish up to 10 at a time, each one runs 15 minutes to 31 days, and you can schedule one as little as instantly or as much as 14 days ahead of its start. Most indie developers have never created one, which means the surface is uncrowded even in competitive categories.
If you ship a seasonal update, a limited-time challenge, or a content drop and you are only announcing it in your What’s New text, you are leaving a distribution surface unused. In-app events are a distinct piece of App Store Connect metadata, submitted and reviewed separately from your app binary, and they show up in places your title and subtitle do not.
What is an App Store in-app event?
An in-app event is a scheduled listing — built from a name, a short description, a long description, and image or video assets — that Apple can display as a card in search results, on your product page, and in the Today, Games, and Apps tabs. It launched with iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 and requires no app update to publish.
Every event needs four pieces of text, each with a hard limit:
| Field | Limit | Where it appears |
|---|---|---|
| Reference name | 64 characters | App Store Connect only, never shown to users |
| Event name | 30 characters | On the event card, title case |
| Short description | 50 characters | On the event card, sentence case |
| Long description | 120 characters | On the event details page only, sentence case |
The reference name is purely internal — use it to tell your events apart in App Store Connect. The other three are what users see.
How long can an event run, and how many can you have live at once?
An event can run for as little as 15 minutes or as long as 31 days. You can publish up to 10 events at a time on the App Store, and you can hold up to 15 approved events in App Store Connect at once, giving you a buffer to queue the next one while ten are still live.
You can schedule an event to go live immediately or up to 14 days ahead of its start date. If you’re running the event across multiple regions with different local start times, all regional start times must fall within 48 hours of each other. Once an event is published, you can still edit its start and end dates, but both must remain in the future — you cannot retroactively extend an event that already ended.
What are the seven event badges?
Every event gets exactly one badge, and Apple defines what each one is for:
- Live Event — real-time, simultaneous experiences, like a sports match or a live-streamed concert
- Premiere — first-time availability of content, like a newly released movie or audio drop
- Challenge — activities that push a user toward a goal before the event ends, like a fitness challenge or clearing a set number of levels
- Competition — users competing against each other for ranking or rewards, like a tournament
- New Season — new content, storylines, or media added to something already established
- Major Update — significant new features or content, not minor UI tweaks or bug fixes
- Special Event — anything limited-time that doesn’t fit the other six, like a brand collaboration
Picking the wrong badge is a common rejection reason. A weekly leaderboard reset is not a Challenge if there’s no end state a user is working toward — Apple’s guidelines explicitly exclude repetitive, recurring activities like daily tasks or rewards from event eligibility. A price drop with no new content is not eligible either.
Do in-app events help you rank in App Store search?
Apple’s documentation confirms event cards appear in search results for users who already have your app installed, and that users can search for an event directly by name. What Apple has not published is the exact logic behind which searches surface a given card, and whether text in your event name or short description behaves as a search-ranking input the way your keyword field does.
What you can verify yourself: the event name and short description are the only text on the card, so whatever terms you put there are what a searching user sees and what any matching logic — published or not — has to work with. Treat an event as a free, time-boxed test of discovery language rather than a guaranteed ranking lever. If a term in an event card correlates with a spike in impressions for that search term, that’s a signal worth tracking against your regular keyword rankings, not a permanent metadata change you’re locked into.
How do you submit one, and what does the review process require?
If your app hasn’t been approved yet, your first in-app event has to be submitted in the same App Review submission as your first app version — you cannot publish an event before the app itself exists on the Store. Once your app is approved, you can submit events on their own, with or without an accompanying app version update.
Creating and submitting an event requires the Account Holder, Admin, App Manager, or Marketing role in App Store Connect. Media has separate specs for the event card (landscape, for search and tab placements) and the event details page (portrait, for the full-screen view after a tap) — check the current In-App Event media and audio specifications page in App Store Connect Help before exporting assets, since resolution requirements are the most common reason media gets rejected.
Apple’s content rules for event copy are specific: no unverifiable superlatives like “best” or “#1,” no specific pricing since it varies by region, and no borders, gradients, or heavy logo treatment on the media itself. Proper title case for the event name and sentence case for both descriptions are enforced, not just recommended.
A first-event checklist
If you’ve never published one, the fastest path to something submittable:
- Pick a real limited-time moment you already have planned — a seasonal content drop, a feature launch, a challenge with a clear end state. Don’t invent one just to have an event live.
- Match it to the correct badge from the seven above. If it doesn’t cleanly fit one, it may not be eligible.
- Write the event name (30 characters, title case) and short description (50 characters, sentence case) as if they’re the only two things a user will read before deciding to tap — because for most of your reach, they are.
- Export event card and event details media to spec, avoiding text-heavy overlays.
- Submit at least a few days before you want it live, and no more than 14 days ahead of your intended start date.
- Set the event to run at least 15 minutes and no more than 31 days — pick the actual duration of the thing you’re promoting, not the maximum allowed.
The uncrowded surface
Most indie developers have shipped dozens of app versions and zero in-app events, because the feature sits in a different part of App Store Connect than the metadata workflow they already know. That gap is the opportunity: your event name and short description are additional user-facing text that most of your direct competitors have never written, tied to a real thing happening in your app right now.