App Store creative assets: no prices, discounts or URLs in the art

Can a Black Friday app asset say 40% off? Apple's asset rules bar pricing, discounts and URLs. What to leave out, and how to generate art with room for type.

4 min readSume
All posts

No: Apple's asset best practices list specific pricing, discounts and website URLs as things to keep out of App Store creative assets, so a "50% off Black Friday" banner cannot be the product-page art. The same list rules out copyright symbols, unverified claims, logos of other platforms and Apple's own recognitions such as Editor's Choice.

That comes from App Store Asset Best Practices and Resources (read 2026-10-11). For an app running a holiday sale, the practical answer is to make the asset about the app, leave room for localized short text, and keep the sale terms out of the pixels. Sume can make the image; it cannot tell you where else Apple lets you state an offer, and this post does not cover rules for surfaces other than creative assets.

What Apple lists as off limits in an asset

Apple's page has a prohibited-content list under metadata and text. The items below are the ones a seasonal campaign tends to hit.

Prohibited in App Store assets per Apple's asset best practices (read 2026-10-11), with the usual holiday temptation.
Apple prohibitsHoliday temptation
Specific pricing"Now $2.99" on a sale poster
Discounts"Black Friday: 40% off" badge
Website URLsA promo link in the corner
Copyright symbols(c) line copied from a web banner
Unverified claims"Best app of 2026" with no award behind it
Logos or references to other platforms or marketplacesA "Also on Google Play" badge
Apple recognitions (Editor's Choice, App of the Day, Game of the Day, Apple Design Award winner)Reusing a past feature as proof

What Apple asks for instead

The same page says to use short phrases that enhance the visuals rather than describe them, keep all text legible across devices, and localize for every supported language. It also asks for a safe area, with the focal point in the center of the composition so that nothing is clipped on different devices, and suggests the App Store Connect preview tool to check.

  • Generate the picture with no lettering in it, and set the type in your own design tool so every language is spelled correctly.
  • Keep the focal point in the middle third of the frame.
  • Make one image per market rather than translating text baked into pixels.

Generating art with room for type

Image models spell badly in some scripts and sometimes add characters you did not request. The safer pattern is a text-free image with deliberate empty space. Sume's first-party magazine cover Format is described as a bold portrait with designed negative space and clean type zones, which is the same idea applied to a cover; its catalog slug is sume-magazine-cover-campaign, and you read GET /v1/formats/sume/{slug} before calling it to see its io profile.

For a plain image job, put the layout in the prompt: subject in the center, a calm band at the top for a headline, no signage, no text. Image API lists Ideogram 4.5 at $0.03, $0.06 or $0.22 per image by quality, so five markets at the medium tier is 5 x $0.06 = $0.30 for the pictures; the type is added afterward.

Keep the sale where Apple allows it

The asset carries brand and product; the offer travels through channels whose rules you have read. If your holiday creative also runs as a video ad elsewhere, you can bake the price in there, because the Apple rule applies to assets shown on the App Store. For that split see Mobile-app UGC Format: holiday app ads vs App Store previews, and for the 4+ age ceiling that applies to the same assets see App Store creative assets must be 4+.

Sources

Related posts

More in Use cases

All Use cases posts

Written by Sume