Apple has published design templates for the App Store’s two newest advertising formats. It has not published their dimensions — not in text, not anywhere a person, a search engine or a purchase order can reach.
01What Apple’s asset page actually publishes
The canonical page is developer.apple.com/app-store/asset-best-practices. It went up around August 5, 2026, according to PPC Land’s coverage; Apple itself prints no date on it. It is a good page. It explains what a product page header is for, what a search result asset is for, that assets must meet a 4+ age rating regardless of the app’s own rating, and that pricing, discounts, website URLs and copyright symbols are prohibited. We took those rules apart when they first surfaced.
It offers twelve template downloads. Six for product page headers — Figma Universal, Photoshop Header, Photoshop Universal, Pixelmator Header, Pixelmator Universal, Sketch Universal — and the same six for search results with the Header variants swapped for Search results variants.
Every one of those twelve links is an opaque redirector of the form developer.apple.com/go/?id=…. You cannot see the filename, the file type or the file size before you click. Sketch, incidentally, appeared in that list without announcement: Apple’s own August 5 developer news item named only Figma, Photoshop and Pixelmator.
02The four things that are not on it
Read the page for numbers and you find none. As of September 16, 2026, it states no pixel dimensions, no resolutions, no file-size ceilings and no video durations for the header or search-result formats.
The single aspect-ratio sentence on the page is about a different object entirely: “Design for both aspect ratios. You need media for the event card (16:9 landscape) and the event details page (9:16 portrait).” That is In-App Events, which predates creative assets by years.
→ THE ONE EXCEPTION
Two specs do exist — on the other website
Apple’s advertising site, not its developer site, publishes the format specification in prose: “Images and videos must use a 3:2 aspect ratio” and “Videos must be between 5-30 seconds in length and can only be used in search results ads,” plus that video “can be uploaded with or without audio, but audio will not play.” That is the complete set of machine-readable specification text for these formats, and it sits on the page a designer is least likely to open. We flagged the split estate when that page first appeared.
An aspect ratio is not a dimension. It tells a designer the shape of the canvas and nothing about its size, its export resolution, its compression budget or its safe area. Every other number is inside a .fig, a .psd, a .pxd or a .sketch.
03Nobody has the numbers — not even the vendors
The obvious objection is that this does not matter, because the trade press will extract the numbers and republish them. Six weeks on, it has not.
PPC Land’s dedicated August 6 piece on the format reports that Apple “released design templates for Figma, Photoshop and Pixelmator” and quotes no pixel dimension at all; the only technical specification it reproduces is the In-App Events aspect-ratio pair, which is to say the one spec Apple happened to put in text.
MobileAction, an ASO vendor with an explicit commercial reason to be the place people look this up, published a dedicated explainer on August 18 which says “Header images and search result videos are new formats with their own specs” and then declines to state any of them, noting instead that detailed guidance from Apple is expected soon.
We did find one vendor publishing an apparently complete pixel table for Apple advertising formats, with a 2026 verification stamp and a claim of sourcing to official Apple documentation. On inspection, every figure in it — the 1024 × 1024 icon, the 1320 × 2868 and 1242 × 2208 iPhone screenshots, the iPad sizes — is an App Store Connect screenshot and app preview specification, which Apple does publish in text. The header and search-result formats are simply absent, with the publishable specs standing quietly in their place.
0
published pixel dimensions for the product page header or search result creative asset that we could locate anywhere in public circulation as of September 16, 2026 — from Apple, from trade press, or from any ASO vendor.
This is a stronger claim than the one we expected to make. We went looking for evidence that every circulating number was template-derived. Instead there are no circulating numbers. The specifications have not escaped the design files.
04The same company publishes exact specs one directory away
What makes this an argument rather than a grumble is that Apple demonstrably knows how to do the other thing, on the same domain, in the same quarter.
Apple’s Apple News advertiser help tree publishes specifications in plain, indexable HTML, at a level of precision the App Store side does not approach. The interstitial page gives iPhone at 1242 × 2208 pixels with a content safe area of 1242 × 1778, iPad and Mac at 1536 × 2048, and a maximum file size of 500 KB. The direct response template page gives a centre image at 1200 × 628, a 4:5 ratio for the left and right variants, the same 500 KB ceiling, and ad title limits of 90 and 150 characters. The premium sponsorship page gives a masthead logo between 96 and 1280 pixels wide by 128 high, PNG only; a large banner at 1242 × 699; carousel cards at 1080 × 1080 with a 4 MB ceiling; and video at 16:9 with a 250 MB ceiling.
| Surface | How it is bought | Where the spec lives |
|---|
| Apple News | Insertion order, account manager | Exact pixels, in HTML |
| App Store assets | Self-serve auction | Inside a binary design file |
| In-App Events | Organic, App Store Connect | Aspect ratios only, in HTML |
One reading fits the pattern: Apple documents precisely where a salesperson would otherwise have to answer the question. The direct-sold surface has a human in the loop who would be fielding spec emails all day, so the specs are published. The self-serve surface has no such person, and the spec is a file. We offer that as a reading, not as a rule — Apple has never described its documentation policy, and a simpler explanation is that the format is unfinished.
05Which Apple pages carry a date, and which do not
The second half of the problem is versioning, and here the split is clean enough to tabulate.
Apple dates its engineering surfaces. App Store Connect release notes are dated to the day and are the only page in this estate that reliably is — which is why they are the best available ship detector, and why their silence on the Asset Library through September 9, 10 and 14 was the strongest evidence that the format missed iOS 27. The AdServices changelog is dated to the month. Apple dates its legal surfaces too: the Advertising Services Terms of Service carries an effective date of July 28, 2026, and the Apple Advertising Policies carry “Last updated February 26, 2025” — a date now more than eighteen months stale on a document Apple names as one of the two rulebooks governing creative assets.
Apple does not date its marketing or creative-guidance surfaces. The asset best practices page, the What’s New page, the Apple Ads creative assets help page and every Apple Ads help article we opened carry no publication date, no last-updated stamp and no changelog. The footer says “Copyright © 2026 Apple Inc.” and nothing more.
Which produces sentences like this one, live on an undated page on September 16: “Coming this fall. More detailed resources and guidance will be available later this summer in order to help you plan and create your visual assets.” Summer has ended. The guidance did not come. And because the page is undated, there is no way to establish from the public record when that promise was made, or whether it has been edited since. We keep a running file of this behaviour precisely because nothing else does.
06The fair comparison, which cuts both ways
It would be easy and wrong to write this as Apple being uniquely careless. We checked, and it is not.
Google Ads Help articles carry no publication date, no last-updated stamp and no revision history either. Google’s developer-facing Google Ads API documentation does carry dated release notes. That is exactly Apple’s split: engineering docs dated, help-centre marketing docs undated. Meta’s Business Help Centre we could not evaluate at all, because it blocks automated retrieval outright — which is its own kind of finding, but not one we can turn into a comparison.
The undated help centre is a genre convention across the whole ad-platform industry. What is distinctive to Apple is putting the only precise specification for a live commercial format inside a binary design file.
Keep those two complaints separate, because only the second one is actually unusual, and only the second one has a concrete operational cost.
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07The one dated mechanism Apple built and barely uses
There is one place Apple gives its advertising documentation a genuine version history, and it is worth knowing about because it is the exception that measures the rule.
Apple’s AdServices API reference PDFs carry a date inside their own URL path — a v3 published under a 2025-03-25 segment and a v4 under a 2026-09-01 segment. That gives you a stable, citable, comparable pair of documents, which is how the September 2026 attribution changes could be evidenced at all.
We swept the wider document store for other dated artefacts. There are none. The v1 PDF in the same family sits at a path with no date segment, which shows the dated paths were retrofitted from v3 onward. The OAuth reference has no date. The mainland China advertising guidelines have no date or version. The insertion order terms carry an effective date inside the file but not in the path. One orphaned artefact is still published under the name Apple-Search-Ads-API-3.0.pdf, carrying a brand Apple retired in April 2025. And the paths themselves are inconsistent across three different namespace shapes.
So Apple built a dating mechanism, applied it to exactly one document family, started halfway through that family’s life, and applied it to nothing else.
08What this costs a team, concretely
Five things become impossible, and each of them is ordinary work.
You cannot brief an external designer with a number. You must send a file and hope they own the application. You cannot put the spec in a ticket, a scope of work or a purchase order, because there is no text to paste. You cannot verify a vendor’s claim, which is exactly how an App Store Connect screenshot table ends up standing in for a creative asset table without anyone noticing. You cannot diff what changed, because there is no version, no date and no changelog — Sketch appeared in the template list and we only know because we had recorded the earlier list ourselves. And you cannot search for it, because no crawler extracts artboard geometry from a proprietary binary, which means the answer is invisible to search engines and to every assistant your team asks.
That last one compounds. A specification that cannot be indexed cannot be summarised, cited or checked by anything downstream of a search box, which is now most of how working knowledge actually moves.
09How to brief a designer anyway
Four steps, none of them clever, all of them things nobody will do for you.
First, download all four template families rather than one. They are versioned independently and nothing tells you whether the Photoshop Header and the Figma Universal agree. Second, open each and record the artboard dimensions, safe areas and export settings into a plain-text spec of your own, with the download date on it. That document is now your organisation’s citable source, because Apple has not provided one. Third, treat every number in it as derived and label it that way, so that when Apple eventually publishes prose specs you can diff yours against theirs rather than quietly discovering a mismatch in a rejection. Fourth, re-download before each campaign build and diff the artboards; that is the only change-detection available.
Then plan around the second review. Apple has committed in writing that ads using creative assets will be reviewed “according to guidelines we’ll share at a later date,” which means an App Store Connect approval does not clear an asset for paid use — a constraint we worked through in the piece on the review window. Budget queue time accordingly; the only review-speed figure Apple publishes anywhere is App Review’s “on average, 90% of submissions are reviewed in less than 24 hours,” which describes app submissions and not this object.
And stay proportionate. The search-result asset is the first thing a person sees after they type what they want, which is why it matters to the surface that sells declared intent and why it will eventually belong in your product page testing plan. It is not shipped yet. Preparation is cheap; rebuilding a creative pipeline against guesses is not.
10Known gaps
We could not read the templates ourselves in this environment, so we cannot tell you what the artboard dimensions are either — we can only tell you, with the checking shown, that Apple has not published them in text and that nobody else has published them at all. If a template carries a dimension we have missed, we would rather be corrected than repeat this.
Apple has published no ship date for the format since iOS 27 arrived without it, and no revised timeline. The promised Apple Ads creative guidelines do not exist. Apple publishes no review turnaround and no appeal path for asset rejections, and whether a rejection propagates across the shared organic and paid asset pool is undocumented. Apple’s reporting still offers no asset-level dimension, so the effect of the format will not be diagnosable from Apple’s own data when it does land — which is also why so many delivery questions in this platform resolve to inference.
The Internet Archive was unreachable from our environment across nine attempts, so we could not diff any of these pages against an earlier capture. Where we say a page changed silently, that rests on our own dated notes rather than on a third-party archive — which is, in miniature, the entire problem this piece is about.