App Store character limits for every listing field
Six fields, six limits:
| Field | Limit | Searchable | Needs a new version to change |
|---|---|---|---|
| App name | 30 | Yes | Yes |
| Subtitle | 30 | Yes | Yes |
| Keywords | 100 | Yes | Yes |
| Promotional text | 170 | No | No |
| Description | 4,000 | No | Yes |
| What's New | 4,000 | No | Yes |
Every limit is per language. A listing in six languages gets six independent 30-character names and six 100-character keyword fields.
What each field is actually for
App name, 30 characters. The name on the product page, the search result and the home screen. It carries the most search weight of any field, which is why so many listings look like Bloom: Habit Tracker. Apple truncates it on narrow layouts and does not publish where, assume the first 12 to 15 characters are the ones people reliably see.
Subtitle, 30 characters. A single line under the name on the product page. Indexed for search, so it is the second most valuable 30 characters you own. It is not a tagline slot: "Simple. Beautiful. Yours." spends thirty searchable characters on nothing.
Keywords, 100 characters. Never shown to anyone. Comma-separated, pure search signal. This field has its own set of rules worth reading properly, because most of the advice about it is wrong.
Promotional text, 170 characters. Sits above the description on the product page. Not indexed, and the only field here you can change without submitting a new version, which makes it the right home for anything time-bound: a sale, an event, a fix that just shipped, a "now with…" line.
Description, 4,000 characters. Not indexed on the App Store. Apple shows roughly the first three lines before a "more" link, so the opening sentence does nearly all the work and the remaining 3,900 characters convince people who already tapped.
What's New, 4,000 characters. Release notes on the update screen. "Bug fixes and performance improvements" is the industry's most-read piece of nothing; naming the bug you fixed is free goodwill from the people who reported it.
Which fields you can change without shipping
This is the distinction that catches teams out mid-launch.
Promotional text updates on a live app, no build, no review of the binary.
Everything else: name, subtitle, keywords, description, What's New, is attached to an app version. You edit it while the version is in "Prepare for Submission", and once that version is live those fields are frozen until the next one.
The practical consequence: do not save your keyword research for after launch. If the keyword field is wrong at submission it stays wrong until your next release, which for a small team can be weeks.
Fields that have limits but are not listing copy
Support URL, Marketing URL and Privacy Policy URL are URLs with no meaningful character pressure. Copyright, version string and the App Review notes field have their own limits that App Store Connect enforces at save time, the review notes box in particular is generous and badly underused, since it is where you tell a reviewer how to reach the feature behind a login.
In-app purchase and subscription names have their own, much tighter limits, 30 characters for a display name and 45 for a description, and they are a separate topic.
What happens when you go over
The API rejects the value. Not silently, not truncated, the push fails with a validation error naming the field, and the whole metadata update can fail with it.
Any tool that writes listings for you should clamp to the limit before it talks to Apple, and the clamp should happen after generation, not during. AI-written copy in particular has an ugly habit of producing a 31-character name that reads perfectly.
Two counting caveats worth knowing:
- Limits are characters, not bytes. Japanese and Korean listings get the same 30 characters as English ones, which is considerably more room in practice.
- Emoji, accented characters and anything built from combining marks may or may not count as one character depending on which counter you trust. Leave a character or two spare rather than proving a point at exactly 30.
Getting the most out of 30 + 30 + 100
The name, subtitle and keyword field are pooled for search. Apple treats them as one bag of words: order does not matter, and a word already in your name earns nothing by appearing in your keyword field again.
So spend them as one budget, not three:
- Put the strongest term in the name, where it also does branding work.
- Put the second and third strongest in the subtitle, phrased as a readable line.
- Fill the keyword field with everything not already used, no duplicates, no spaces after commas.
Then leave the description to sell the thing, because on the App Store it is not being read by the search index.
AppSubmit enforces each of these limits in the editor and clamps anything the AI writer overshoots, but the numbers in the table above are the whole specification, a character counter does the same job.