Here's the uncomfortable fact that should shape everything about how you write an App Store description: most people never expand it. The product page shows two or three lines above a "more" link, and the overwhelming majority of visitors decide from the icon, the screenshots, the rating and those few lines.
That's not an argument for writing less. It's an argument for knowing exactly what job each part of the text is doing, and stopping the moment a part stops doing one.
The subtitle is not a tagline
Thirty characters, directly under the app name, indexed for search and read by every single visitor. It is the most valuable text real estate you own and it's routinely wasted on something atmospheric.
A subtitle has one job: tell someone what the game is, in words they might have searched for. "Relax. Solve. Repeat." is a tagline — it tells a stranger nothing. "Color logic puzzles, no numbers" tells them what they're looking at and earns its keywords honestly.
The test we use: if you covered the icon and screenshots, could someone describe the game from the subtitle alone? If not, rewrite it.
The first three lines carry the whole page
Assume the reader sees roughly the first 250 characters and nothing else. Those lines have to do three things in order:
- Say what it is, plainly, in the first sentence. Not the mood, not the philosophy. The mechanic.
- Say what's different about it, in one clause. Why this one and not the forty others in the results list.
- Remove the biggest objection, immediately. For a mobile puzzle game in 2026 that objection is almost always about ads, forced accounts, or paywalls.
That third point is worth dwelling on. If your game genuinely works offline, has no account requirement, or doesn't interrupt with video ads, say it in the visible portion rather than burying it in a feature list. Those are the specific fears people bring to a free puzzle game, and answering them early converts better than any adjective.
Words to cut on sight
"Immersive." "Addictive." "Stunning." "Ultimate." "The perfect way to." Every one of these appears in thousands of listings, carries no information, and reads as boilerplate to a person who has scrolled past forty apps already. Replace each with the concrete thing you meant. "Addictive" usually means "sessions are short and it's easy to start another one" — write that instead.
Then write for the person who did tap "more"
A minority of readers expand the description, and they are disproportionately the people about to install. They're looking for reassurance and specifics, so give them structure rather than prose:
- How it plays — two or three sentences on the actual loop.
- What's in it — puzzle count, difficulty range, daily puzzle, whatever is genuinely there.
- Accessibility — a real, specific section. For a colour-based puzzle this isn't a nice-to-have; a player with colour vision deficiency needs to know before installing whether the game is playable for them. Say exactly what options exist.
- The honest business model — free, paid, what ads look like, what a purchase unlocks. Stated plainly, this builds more trust than it costs installs.
- How to reach a human — a support address. It's the cheapest credibility signal on the page.
Short paragraphs and a few line breaks. The App Store description doesn't render markdown or HTML, so structure comes from line breaks and plain characters — and long unbroken blocks are, on a phone, functionally unreadable.
What the description is not for
On the Apple App Store, the description is not indexed for search. Every keyword you stuff into it is doing nothing for discovery — it's only making the page worse for the humans who read it. (This differs from Google Play, where the description does feed search, which is why so much cross-platform ASO advice is subtly wrong on one store or the other.)
So: keywords go in the name, subtitle and keyword field. The description is pure conversion writing. Treat them as separate jobs with separate rules.
Promotional text is the part you can change
The 170-character promotional text sits above the description and — unlike everything else — can be updated without submitting a new build. That makes it the right place for anything time-sensitive: a new puzzle pack, a seasonal event, an acknowledgement that you're aware of a bug and a fix is coming.
Most indie listings leave it empty or set it once and forget it. Using it as a small, live channel is free and it makes the page look maintained, which matters more than you'd think to someone deciding whether a small app is abandoned.
Localisation, again
Same argument as with keywords. Each localisation gets its own subtitle, description and promotional text, and for a puzzle game the text volume is small enough that this is a genuinely tractable job. Machine translation followed by a native speaker's pass is usually enough for store metadata — but don't ship raw machine output, because a subtly wrong description reads as a scam listing in exactly the markets you were hoping to reach.
Rewrite it after launch, once
The description you write before launch is a guess about how people will describe your game. After a few months you'll have reviews and support emails, which is the same thing but true.
Read them and notice the phrases that recur. If five people independently call it "relaxing" and your description never uses the word, your description is describing a different game than the one you shipped. That rewrite — using your players' actual vocabulary — is usually the single largest conversion improvement available to a small game's store page, and it costs an afternoon.