Apple did not delete the offer from the App Store. It took over drawing it — and most of the coverage has missed that entirely.
When Apple published its asset best-practices guidance ahead of the iOS 27 launch, the trade press read one sentence and stopped. The sentence is this: “Don’t include specific pricing, discounts, website URLs, copyright symbols.” Every guide since has repeated it as a prohibition and moved on to aspect ratios.
Nobody asked the obvious follow-up. Creative assets occupy the product page header and the search-results slot — the first thing a person sees in both of the places an Apple Ads advertiser buys. If your growth model runs on a first month free, a launch discount, or an annual plan at half the monthly rate, and the two surfaces that meet declared intent can no longer say so, then where does the offer go?
Apple has an answer. It has never written it down in one place, and it is not the answer the prohibition implies. This is a map of every App Store surface that can still carry an offer, in the order a person encounters them, with a note on which ones an Apple Ads advertiser actually controls.
01What Apple banned, and the reason it gave
The prohibition is two sentences on Apple’s asset best-practices page, and the second sentence matters more than the first:
Don’t include specific pricing, discounts, website URLs, copyright symbols. This ensures your content remains relevant to a global audience and more evergreen.
That is a globalisation rationale, not a consumer-protection one. Apple is not saying discounts mislead people. It is saying a discount rendered into a static image is wrong somewhere — wrong currency, wrong percentage, wrong eligibility, wrong the day after the promotion ends. The same page bars logos referencing other platforms, unverifiable award claims, and self-applied Apple recognitions such as Editor’s Choice, on the grounds that those already appear alongside your app where Apple controls them.
Read the list together and a pattern emerges: Apple is removing from developer-drawn pixels every claim it can render itself, more accurately, from structured data. That reading is not decoration. It predicts exactly where the offer went.
Two scope notes, because most coverage gets them wrong. The page carries no publication date and no changelog, which is true of essentially every Apple advertising document — a pattern we have catalogued at length. And the page’s own statement of where assets appear is narrower than the trade lists suggest: “Creative assets appear across the App Store in iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 and later including your product page, in search results, and when your app is featured.” The fuller enumeration that includes custom product pages, In-App Events and Apple Ads placements comes from vendors reading the WWDC guidance, not from this page.
02The rule is older than the format
Here is the finding that should change how you read this. The obvious workaround — if the asset cannot say “50% off”, put it in the subtitle, which appears under the app name in every ad — was closed eighteen months before creative assets were announced.
Apple’s advertising policies, last updated February 26, 2025, state under the Today tab section:
The app icon, name, and subtitle must not include pricing, offers, or ranking claims.
That is a separate document, a separate regime, and a date that predates iOS 27 by a year and a half — well before the 4+ age-rating ceiling and the rest of the asset rulebook were announced. The same policy set requires that “all claims made in ad content must be adequately substantiated” and, under deceptive pricing, that “prices and any rating claims must be accurate at all times.” Apple has been governing offer claims in advertising for years; it is now extending the same position to a new surface.
→ WHY THIS MATTERS
Treating this as a 2026 surprise leads you to the wrong plan
If you read the asset rule as new, you look for a loophole. If you read it as the extension of a February 2025 policy, you look for the surface Apple built for offers — which is what section 04 describes. The second reading is better sourced and produces a workable answer.
03Every surface that can still carry an offer
Four surfaces can carry a commercial offer to somebody who has not installed your app. One cannot, despite being the surface everyone assumes is for exactly this. Here is the inventory, with Apple’s own language on reach.
| Surface | Reaches a pre-install user? | Who draws the price | Needs an app release? |
|---|
| Promoted in-app purchase | Yes — product page, and “can appear in search results” | Apple, from structured data | No |
| Promotional text | Yes — top of the description | You, in 170 characters | No |
| Win-back offer | Lapsed subscribers only, and only if promoted | Apple | No |
| Custom product page | Yes — inherits promotional text | You, in text only | No |
| Creative asset | Yes — header and search results | Nobody. Pricing barred. | No |
| In-App Event | Yes, but pricing causes rejection | Nobody | No |
Note the last column. Every one of these moves without shipping a binary, which is a meaningful change from the era when a seasonal campaign meant a release train. The constraint is no longer engineering throughput — it is Apple’s review queue, which is the scarce resource nobody is budgeting for.
This is the part the coverage missed. Apple’s promoting-in-app-purchases documentation says:
Promoted In-App Purchases appear on your product page, can display in search results, and may be featured on the Today, Games, and Apps tabs.
And then, decisively:
If your auto-renewable subscription is a promoted In-App Purchases, the introductory price will display on the App Store for eligible customers running iOS 11.2 and later.
Read those two together against the asset ban. Apple has not removed the introductory price from the product page or from search results. It has moved the rendering of that price out of your artwork and into system chrome — locale-correct, currency-correct, and gated on the viewer’s actual eligibility. You lose the pixels. You gain a price that is right in 175 storefronts and 44 currencies without you maintaining 175 images.
That is the same rationale Apple gave for the ban, and it is internally consistent: “relevant to a global audience and more evergreen.” The offer did not leave the surface. Authorship of it did.
The operating constraints are tight and worth knowing before you plan around them. You may promote up to 20 in-app purchases at a time. The display name runs to 30 characters, the description to 45, and the promotional image is a 1024×1024 PNG or JPEG. Consumable in-app purchases will not appear in search results at all. And Apple is explicit that this is not a pre-install transaction in the way it is sometimes described: “When a user doesn’t have your app installed but wants to buy a promoted In-App Purchases, they’ll receive a prompt to download the app first. Once the app is downloaded, the transaction will continue in the app.” The offer is visible before install; the purchase completes after it.
For an Apple Ads advertiser this is the whole ball game, because it is the one mechanism that carries a price into a search result. The App Store audience already spends several times more per download than the alternative platform — the structural reason search placement on iOS buys the highest-value users available anywhere — and a correctly rendered introductory price at the moment of declared intent is the highest-leverage configuration change available on the surface.
20
promoted in-app purchases at a time, per Apple’s own limit — against 70 custom product pages. The offer surface is materially narrower than the creative surface, and it is the one nobody is auditing.
05The only lever that moves without a release
Promotional text is the second answer, and Apple names the use case itself. From the product page documentation: “Consider using this to share the latest news about your app, such as limited-time sales or upcoming features.” And, critically: “You can update promotional text at any time without having to submit a new version of your app.”
So Apple explicitly blesses a limited-time sale in the one field you can change on an afternoon’s notice. That is the direct counterpoint to the asset ban and it is stated in Apple’s own documentation, not inferred.
Be honest about its position, though. Promotional text runs to 170 characters and sits at the top of the description — which is to say below the fold, behind a tap, at the opposite end of the product page from the header the creative asset now owns. It is a real offer surface with poor placement. The person who scrolls to it was already converting.
The structural oddity this produces is worth stating plainly, because it is the concrete workflow change: on a single custom product page, the text may say “limited-time sale” and the image above it may not. The offer is now text and structured data. The asset is brand and mood. Teams that brief one designer to do both will produce rejections.
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06In-App Events are closed to you
The intuitive answer — run the sale as an In-App Event, since events are literally a time-boxed promotional surface on the product page and in search — is wrong, and Apple warns about it twice.
First as a content rule: “Don’t include specific prices in your metadata, as pricing and currencies can vary across regions and can be changed independent of your event. Including specific pricing will lead to rejection by App Review.” Second as a candidacy rule: Apple names “price promotions that don’t introduce any new content, features, or goods” as a poor candidate for an event at all, alongside “general promotions that raise awareness about your app or game.”
The mechanics are otherwise generous — seven event types, up to 31 days per event, 15 approved in App Store Connect and 10 published simultaneously, with pre-promotion up to 14 days ahead. Metadata runs to a 30-character event name, a 50-character short description on the card and 120 characters on the detail page. There is exactly one price-adjacent field, and it is a flag rather than a figure: you indicate whether an in-app purchase is required to participate.
There is also a discovery asymmetry that undercuts the acquisition case independently. In search results, Apple shows the event card to people who have already downloaded the app and screenshots to people who have not. The surface most likely to carry momentum language is preferentially shown to your existing users. It is a retention surface in an acquisition costume.
07What an Apple Ads advertiser controls
Now the crux, and it is stricter than most advertisers realise. Apple Ads has no advertiser-written headline field. No description field. No ad copy of any kind. Apple’s placement documentation states it in one sentence:
Ads are created using the metadata and assets you already uploaded in App Store Connect.
A search-results ad is the default product page, or an ad variation built from a custom product page. A Today tab ad is your app name, icon and subtitle with custom product page assets animating behind. That is the entire creative surface, and every element of it is governed either by the February 2025 policy or by the asset guidance.
So the precise formulation is this: an Apple Ads advertiser cannot write an offer into an ad, but can configure one into it. The offer travels as a promoted in-app purchase, rendered by Apple, riding along with the product page the ad points at. Copywriting is not a lever on this platform. Configuration is.
That has a practical consequence for how you structure an account. If the offer is a property of the promoted in-app purchase rather than of the ad, then offer testing is not creative testing — it happens in App Store Connect, on a different cadence, with different approvals, and it is invisible to the campaign reporting you would normally use to benchmark tap-through and conversion rates. Teams that expect to A/B an offer inside an ad group will find no control to turn. The nearest thing to an offer test on this platform runs through product page optimization, which has its own hard 90-day ceiling and a maximum of three treatments.
08Thematic is permitted, numeric is not
One more distinction, and it is the practical takeaway. Apple’s WWDC 2026 App Store guidance invites developers to use the expanded image and video options to highlight “your brand, seasonal offerings, exciting new content, and more.” The asset rules bar “specific pricing, discounts.”
Both sentences are Apple’s. Put together, the permitted register is thematic — a holiday treatment, a Black Friday visual language, a seasonal world — and the banned register is numeric. “Holiday Event” passes. “50% off” does not. Vendors have converged on the same reading: SplitMetrics’ WWDC recap describes building an asset around “a new update, seasonal offer, etc.” without ever addressing the pricing rule.
State the epistemic status honestly, though, because this is the one place where the piece is reading rather than quoting: Apple has never articulated a thematic/numeric line as a rule. It is inferable from two of its sentences and it is what the vendor consensus assumes. It has not been tested against a live review queue, because the format has not shipped. Brief your designers on it as a working hypothesis with a rejection risk attached, not as policy.
There is one genuine disagreement in the market worth flagging rather than smoothing. NeoAds published an August 24, 2026 analysis asserting a paid-versus-organic split — that Apple’s organic rulebook bans discount messaging while paid ads may carry “seasonal hooks and sale messaging,” with an aspect ratio available only to paid. We could not verify any of that from Apple. The asset best-practices page draws no paid/organic distinction, and the February 2025 Today tab policy cuts directly against it. Treat the claim as unverified; if it turns out to be right, the map in section 03 changes materially.
09What nobody knows yet
The honest inventory of what is still unresolved, because the confident guides do not have this either.
Whether a promoted in-app purchase image may carry pricing. The 1024×1024 promotional image sits on the product page and Apple’s in-app purchase documentation says nothing about pricing in it. It is not obviously covered by the creative-asset guidance, which governs a different object. This is a live ambiguity on the single most important offer surface, and Apple has not addressed it.
Whether one approval satisfies both rulebooks. Apple instructs asset creators to know “the App Review Guidelines (particularly section 2.3 about Accurate Metadata) and the Apple Advertising Policies.” Those are different documents with different prohibitions. Whether a paid use of an approved asset triggers a second review is undocumented — which matters, because a rejection on a shared asset pool is an availability problem rather than a compliance one.
Whether any of this moves conversion. There is no public, dated figure isolating the effect of a visible offer on App Store install conversion. RevenueCat’s 2026 benchmarks — published March 19, 2026 across 115,000-plus apps, with no stated data-collection window — measure what happens after install: a 10.7% median day-35 trial conversion on hard paywalls against 2.1% on freemium, and 17-to-32-day trials converting at 42.5% against 25.5% for trials under four days. Those numbers say offer structure dominates outcomes post-install. They say nothing about pre-install offer visibility, and anyone quoting a percentage lift for showing a price in search results is quoting something that does not exist.
When any of it ships. Apple’s only timing language for creative assets remains “the fall launch,” and it has published no iOS 27 date. Until the format is live, no rejection data and no performance data exist, and every conversion-lift claim about creative assets in circulation is extrapolation.
The plan that survives all of that uncertainty is short. Audit whether your introductory offer is actually configured as a promoted in-app purchase, because that is the only mechanism that carries a price into a search result and it is capped at 20. Move offer copy into promotional text, which you can change without a release. Brief asset designers on brand and season, never on numbers. And stop expecting the ad to do work the platform has never let an ad do.