App Store Connect character limits

A complete reference for every character limit you'll bump into when filling out App Store Connect — for your app's metadata, in-app purchases, subscriptions, and URLs. Plus a live character counter for the field you're working on right now.

Quick reference

Field	Limit	Where it appears
App Name name	30	Under the app icon in search, charts, and the product page
Subtitle subtitle	30	Below the app name on the product page and in search
Promotional Text promotionalText	170	Top of the description on the product page; editable without a new version
Description description	4,000	Long-form pitch on the product page
Keywords keywords	100	Hidden from users, indexed by App Store search. Comma-separated, no spaces after commas
What's New whatsNew	4,000	Release notes for the current version
Privacy Policy URL	255	Privacy section of the product page
Marketing URL	255	Optional link on the product page
Support URL	255	Required link to support documentation
In-App Purchase Display Name	30	Shown to the user when purchasing
In-App Purchase Description	45	Below the IAP name in the purchase UI
Subscription Group Display Name	30	The grouping shown when comparing subscription tiers
Subscription Display Name	30	Each individual subscription tier name
Subscription Description	45	Tier description inside the subscription group
Promoted IAP Name	30	Shown on the App Store product page if the IAP is promoted
Promoted IAP Description	45	Below the promoted IAP name
Review Notes (App Review)	4,000	Hidden from users; private message to Apple's review team

Why this matters more than the limits themselves

The numbers in the table above are the easy part. The hard part is fitting them 30+ times — once per App Store locale you ship. A few concrete examples from real translations:

• App Name (30 chars). English: "Productivity Tasks" = 18 chars. German: "Anwendung für produktive Aufgaben" = 33 chars — silently truncated by Apple in some surfaces.
• Subtitle (30 chars). English: "Plan your day quickly" = 21 chars. Finnish: "Suunnittele päiväsi nopeasti" = 28 chars. Russian: "Спланируйте свой день быстро" = 28 chars (borderline). One small edit to the English and you blow the cap in 3 languages.
• Keywords (100 chars). English keyword strings almost always fit. Their Ukrainian, Polish, or Czech equivalents almost always don't — the words are longer, the comma overhead is the same, and you have to drop a term to fit.
• What's New ships every release. Per release × every locale = a recurring tax, not a one-time setup.

This is why a limits reference is necessary but not sufficient. The real work is automating the fit-to-limit across every locale every time something changes. App Connect Translate does this part: paste your source once, AI translates with per-field character-limit fitting, review every locale side-by-side, push to App Store Connect in one click. Skip the spreadsheet that tracks what fits where.

Live character counter

Notes on individual fields

App Name (30 characters)

The most important text in your entire listing for App Store search. Apple's algorithm weights name + subtitle + keywords heaviest, and the name highest of the three. Localizations have to fit 30 characters in the target language — this is where machine-translated names break (e.g., "Productivity Tasks" in English fits at 18 chars; the literal German translation "Anwendung für produktive Aufgaben" is 33 and gets silently truncated in some App Store surfaces).

Subtitle (30 characters)

Second most important search field. It's a separate field from the name, indexed independently, and shown directly below the name everywhere your app appears. Treat it as a sharper second sentence, not a tagline.

Keywords (100 characters, hidden)

Comma-separated list, no spaces after commas (Apple counts every space as a character). Don't include singulars + plurals of the same word (Apple's algorithm handles stemming). Don't include your app name or developer name — those are indexed automatically. Don't repeat words used in the App Name or Subtitle — already indexed there. The keywords field is where you put the words you can't get into the visible copy.

Promotional Text (170 characters)

The only field you can edit between releases without submitting a new version for review. Use it for time-sensitive messaging — sales, holiday-themed copy, callouts about a recent press mention. Not indexed by search.

Description (4,000 characters)

Apple recently started weighting the description more in search, but it's still secondary to the name + subtitle + keywords trio. Front-load the first three lines — that's what users see before tapping "more". Bullet points scan better than paragraphs on mobile.

What's New (4,000 characters)

Per release. Required when you submit a new version that changes anything user-facing. Often the most-skipped localization step — many teams localize the static fields once and then ship every release with English-only release notes. Apple's algorithm doesn't penalize this directly, but the conversion drop on non-English locales does.

URLs (255 characters each)

Marketing, Support, and Privacy Policy URLs are per-locale — you can serve a localized landing page or privacy policy by setting different URLs per locale, but most teams just point all locales at the same domain.

Edge cases worth knowing

• Emoji counts. Apple counts an emoji as one or two characters depending on the codepoint — a single-codepoint emoji like 😀 counts as one; a multi-codepoint emoji like 👨‍👩‍👦 (man + woman + boy joined by ZWJ) counts as 5 (or sometimes 8). If you use emojis, test on the actual App Store Connect form, not on a generic character counter.
• Newlines. Each \n in the description or "what's new" counts as one character. Most editors don't show this; a 4,001-character description with 5 paragraph breaks could be 4,005 in App Store Connect's eyes.
• Keywords + spaces. The keywords field counts every character including spaces. Stripping "todo, tasks, productivity" (24 chars with spaces) down to "todo,tasks,productivity" (22 chars) saves space for two extra keywords.
• RTL languages. Arabic and Hebrew descriptions display correctly in App Store Connect but some character counters miscount combining characters. When in doubt, trust App Store Connect's own field counter (visible after you save).
• Trimming on save. App Store Connect silently strips trailing whitespace and double-spaces on save. Counted differently before vs after save.

Where these limits come from

Apple documents these limits across App Store Connect Help and the App Store Connect API reference. They're enforced server-side by Apple — exceeding them returns a 422 Unprocessable Entity from the API and a silent truncation (or save failure) in the web UI. We've collected them here as one reference because Apple's documentation has them split across half a dozen pages.