App Store creative assets must be 4+, even for a 17+ app

Yes: Apple's asset best practices say every asset shown on the App Store must meet a 4+ age rating, even when the app itself is rated higher and aimed at older users. A 17+ app cannot put its edgier ad art into a product page header or a search result; the creative has to pass the youngest rating.

This is from Apple's App Store Asset Best Practices and Resources page (read 2026-10-11). It matters now because creative assets appear across the App Store in iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 and later: on the product page, in search results and when an app is featured. If you generate that art with an image model, nothing in the model knows Apple's rule, so the check is yours.

What Apple says to avoid

Apple lists the content to keep out of assets. Games get one allowance: action imagery is fine, but gore, graphic imagery and weapons pointed directly at a person or the audience are not.

Why generated art needs its own pass

Image models add things you did not ask for. A prompt for a night-time party scene for a social app can return an open bottle on a table, a model for a fitness app can come out in a pose a reviewer reads as suggestive, and any invented signage can contain stray characters. None of that is a defect for a social post, but each is a possible miss against a 4+ ceiling.

Sume's Image API lists Ideogram 4.5 at $0.03, $0.06 or $0.22 per image by quality (Fal list price, per the docs), so a review set is cheap: 20 candidates at the medium tier is 20 x $0.06 = $1.20. Cheap candidates change the workflow. Generate more than you need, discard anything that fails the table above, and keep the survivors.

A short pre-flight for each asset

Run the same five checks on every candidate before it goes anywhere near App Store Connect.

• Describe the scene in the prompt in positive terms and leave out risky props instead of relying on a negative instruction.
• Zoom to 100 percent and read the background, not just the subject.
• Check that no lettering, logo or symbol was invented.
• Have a person who did not write the prompt look at it once, cold.
• Keep the prompt and the model id beside the file, so a rejected asset can be regenerated with one change.

What Sume does and does not do here

Sume generates the image or clip. It does not read Apple's age rating, submit to App Store Connect, or tell you whether Apple will accept an asset. For app video ads that are not store assets, the mobile-app UGC Format is a different path with different rules, and the 4+ ceiling applies to what you upload to the store, not to every ad you run elsewhere.

Two neighboring rules are covered separately: what text may appear inside the asset, and the size of in-app event videos in App Store in-app event video sizes. Treat Apple's page as the source and re-read it before each submission, since the guidance was published for the fall release and can be revised.