iOS 27: What’s Changing in the App Store

Apple recently published its production guidance and design templates, which means the brief window between now and the autumn release is the actual work window.

The framing that matters: this is one new asset system with multiple placements, plus a change in how your icon renders. Treating these updates in the right way will produce something that compounds, so it’s time to get familiar with what’s coming to maximise the opportunity.

A new way to stand out in the App Store

Until now, everything visual on your product page has answered one question: what does this app do? Screenshots and app previews exist to show the product in use, but that’s the constraint Apple has just removed.

Creative assets are a new category of image and video that sit alongside your screenshots rather than replacing them, and they’re allowed to do something different: express your brand, promote seasonal offerings, or showcase new content. They answer a second question: 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 miss and worth noting, Apple has said these assets are evaluated the same way it assesses artwork for featuring, so the quality bar you hit here has editorial consequences beyond your own listing.

The product page header

The header is a full-width image or video sitting at the top of your product page, above the icon, title and download button. It’s the first thing a visitor sees.

Apple’s guidance on it is unusually direct, and worth taking literally: focus on a single clear idea, because visually dense assets dilute impact, and design for someone who has never encountered your app before. That second point is the one internal stakeholders resist, because the header is the most tempting place in the store to put a message aimed at people who already know you.

There’s also a practical efficiency most teams will want: Apple supports a universal creative asset that serves as both your header and your search results asset. For brands with constrained design capacity, one well-made universal asset beats two rushed bespoke ones, and it reinforces recognition across both surfaces.

Search results

This is where the commercial upside concentrates.

Your search result asset is what someone sees in the Search tab before they ever reach your product page, and a significant share of App Store journeys resolve without a product page visit at all. If you don’t supply a dedicated asset, Apple falls back to your In-App Events, app previews and screenshots.

Apple’s guidance for this placement is deliberately different from the header’s, and the difference is instructive. For the header, express your brand. For search, state the obvious,  because search users arrive with specific intent, and Apple recommends showing the actual interface or content so someone can decide immediately.

In other words: brand at the top of the funnel, proof at the point of decision. Using the same creative for both is efficient, but if you have the capacity to differentiate, this is where it pays.

App icons

Here the story is more subtle than “Apple is adding Liquid Glass to icons”, which happened last year with iOS 26.

What’s changed in iOS 27 is a refinement, and in one respect a reversal. Apple has integrated additional layers of Liquid Glass into the icon artwork itself, producing sharper, more defined glyphs. But the gyroscopic shimmer that made iOS 26 icons appear to shift as you tilted the device has been substantially reworked and, in the developer betas, removed. Icons keep subtle edge highlights; they no longer respond to device motion. Users also now get a system-wide slider controlling Liquid Glass intensity from ultra-clear to fully tinted.

The practical implication is the opposite of what a “new material” story would suggest. Icons designed to exploit iOS 26’s glossier, motion-reactive treatment may now look mismatched beside sharper iOS 27 system icons. Apple’s Icon Composer has been updated to build layered icons from a single design across iPhone, iPad, Mac and Watch, with an interactive preview.

The test to apply is “does this hold up at every size, in every appearance mode, at both ends of the transparency slider”. Legibility across contexts is the requirement Apple actually states.

The constraints that will catch teams out

This is the part missing from most coverage, and it’s where projects lose time. Apple’s asset policies are stricter than standard marketing instincts:

• Every asset must meet a 4+ age rating, even if your app itself is rated higher and aimed at adults. 
• No specific pricing or discounts. This matters for the seasonal-campaign use case: a header promoting your Christmas range is fine, a header promoting “30% off” is not. Anyone planning to run flash-sale creative in the header needs to know this before design starts.
• No website URLs, copyright symbols, or logos referencing other platforms or marketplaces.
• No unverifiable claims, and no Apple-designated recognitions such as Editor’s Choice or App of the Day; several of these already appear automatically alongside your listing.
• Video must work silently. Audio is muted by default, videos autoplay and loop, so the creative has to communicate without sound and loop without a visible jump. Apple advises treating any audio as texture rather than information.

It’s worth auditing existing screenshots against these rules at the same time. Pricing, URLs and self-applied badges are non-compliant regardless of the new placements, and this is a natural moment to catch metadata that’s been quietly drifting.

Treat it as an experiment

The strongest argument for acting early is that these assets are testable. Creative assets work with custom product pages and with product page optimisation, so header variants can be A/B tested against live traffic rather than argued about internally.

App Store Connect also now includes an Asset Library as a single home for all assets across placements and platforms, and a product page preview tool that renders your header, name, description, screenshots and search creative as users will see them across devices, languages, dark mode and both orientations. Layout problems that previously surfaced only after a review cycle can now be caught before submission.

Practically, that suggests a sequence: audit current assets against the new policies first, build one visual system rather than three unrelated pieces, preview before submitting, then use PPO to let the data settle the disagreements.


For a decade, App Store Optimisation has largely meant keyword strategy plus screenshot testing. What’s changing this autumn is that the store is becoming a brand surface as well as a conversion surface, with placements that reward a point of view.