iOS 27: What’s Changing in the App Store

It is the most significant addition to App Store real estate in several years, and Apple has now published the production guidance and design templates to go with it. That makes the gap between today and the autumn release the window in which the work actually has to be done.

How you frame this internally matters. It isn’t three separate projects. It is one new asset system that surfaces across several placements, plus a change to the way your icon is rendered. Teams that build a single visual system rather than a set of unrelated one-offs will end up with something that keeps paying back.

Creative assets, and the question they answer

Until now, everything visual on your product page has served one purpose: demonstrating what your app does. Screenshots and app previews exist to show the product in use. That is precisely the restriction Apple has lifted.

Creative assets are a new image and video category that sits alongside your screenshots rather than replacing them, and they are permitted to do something screenshots never could — carry your brand, push a seasonal proposition, or spotlight new content. The question they answer is a second one: what is this, and why should I care right now?

They appear in four places: the product page header, search results, In-App Events, and Apple’s own featuring placements. That last one is easy to overlook and worth flagging. Apple has confirmed these assets are assessed in the same way it assesses artwork for featuring, so the standard you set here has editorial consequences reaching well beyond your own listing.

The product page header

The header is a full-width image or video that sits at the very top of your product page, above the icon, the title and the download button. It is the first thing anyone sees.

Apple’s advice here is unusually blunt, and should be read literally: land one clear idea, because visually busy assets dilute their own impact, and design for a person who has never come across your app before. The second half of that is what internal stakeholders tend to push back on, because the header is the single most tempting slot in the store for a message aimed at people who already know you.

There is also an efficiency most teams will be glad of. Apple supports a universal creative asset that does double duty as both your header and your search results asset. If design capacity is tight, one well-executed universal asset will beat two rushed bespoke ones, and it strengthens recognition across both surfaces.

One thing to plan for on the Dutch storefront specifically: if any copy is baked into the artwork, design it in Dutch first rather than designing in English and translating afterwards. Dutch runs noticeably longer than English, and a headline that sits comfortably in an English mock-up has a habit of breaking the layout once it becomes Ontdek wat er nieuw is. If you serve both a Dutch listing and an English one for the international and expat audience here, that’s two sets of type to test, not one.

Search results

This is where the commercial upside sits.

Your search result asset is what someone encounters in the Search tab before they ever land on your product page, and a substantial proportion of App Store journeys are decided without a product page visit at all. Supply nothing, and Apple falls back on your In-App Events, app previews and screenshots.

Apple’s guidance for this slot deliberately contradicts its guidance for the header, and the contrast is the useful part. In the header, express your brand. In search, state the obvious — people searching arrive with a specific intent, so Apple recommends showing the genuine interface or content and letting them decide on the spot.

Put simply: brand at the top of the funnel, proof at the point of decision. Running the same creative in both places is efficient, but if you have the capacity to differentiate, search is where that investment earns its keep.

App icons

The icon story is more nuanced than “Apple is putting Liquid Glass on icons”, which already happened with iOS 26.

What iOS 27 brings is a refinement, and in one respect a retreat. Apple has worked further layers of Liquid Glass into the icon artwork itself, giving sharper and better defined glyphs. But the gyroscopic shimmer that made iOS 26 icons appear to move as you tilted the handset has been heavily reworked, and in the developer betas it is gone altogether. Icons retain subtle edge highlights, but they no longer react to device motion. On top of that, users now have a system-wide slider that sets Liquid Glass intensity anywhere from ultra-clear to fully tinted.

The practical consequence runs opposite to what a “new material” headline implies. An icon designed to make the most of iOS 26’s glossier, motion-reactive treatment risks looking out of place next to crisper iOS 27 system icons. Apple’s Icon Composer has been updated so a single design generates layered icons for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Watch, with an interactive preview built in.

The question to test against is whether the icon holds up at every size, in every appearance mode, and at both extremes of the transparency slider. Legibility across contexts is what Apple is actually asking for.

The rules that will cost teams time

This is the part most coverage skips, and it is where projects lose weeks. Apple’s asset policies are tighter than standard marketing instinct:

• Every asset has to clear a 4+ age rating, even where the app itself carries a higher rating and is built for adults.
• No specific prices or discounts. This lands hardest on the seasonal use case, which is the obvious reason to reach for a header in the first place. Artwork built around a Sinterklaas or Black Friday moment is fine; artwork built around “30% korting” is not. 
• No website URLs, no copyright symbols, and no logos referencing other platforms or marketplaces. Worth reading carefully in a European context. Since the DMA, alternative distribution and external purchase links are a live commercial option here rather than a hypothetical, so teams running a second route to market have to keep it entirely out of their App Store creative.
• No unverifiable claims, and no Apple-conferred recognitions such as Editor’s Choice or App of the Day, several of which already appear automatically beside your listing anyway. The substantiation point should feel familiar to anyone working to the Nederlandse Reclame Code, and Apple’s line sits comfortably inside it.
• Video has to work in silence. Audio is muted by default, videos autoplay and loop, so the creative needs to land without sound and loop without a visible seam. Apple’s own framing is to treat audio as texture rather than information.

It is worth auditing your existing screenshots against these rules while you are in there. Pricing, URLs and self-awarded badges are non-compliant irrespective of the new placements, so this is a sensible moment to catch metadata that has quietly drifted — including in localised versions, where non-compliant copy tends to survive longest simply because fewer people read it.

Treat it as an experiment

The strongest case for moving early is that all of this is testable. Creative assets work with custom product pages and with product page optimisation, so header variants can be A/B tested against real traffic rather than debated in a meeting room.

App Store Connect now also includes an Asset Library, giving you one home for every asset across placements and platforms, plus a product page preview tool that renders your header, name, description, screenshots and search creative exactly as users will encounter them across devices, languages, dark mode and both orientations. 

If you maintain a Dutch listing alongside an English one, the language switching in that preview is the fastest way to spot type that fits in one locale and breaks in the other. Layout problems that used to reveal themselves only after a review cycle can now be caught pre-submission.

That points to a clear sequence: audit what you already have against the new policies, build one visual system instead of three unconnected pieces, preview across locales before you submit, then let PPO data settle the internal arguments.

For roughly a decade, App Store Optimisation has meant keyword strategy plus screenshot testing. What shifts this autumn is that the store becomes a brand surface as well as a conversion surface, with placements that reward having a point of view.