App Store Featuring Nominations: how to ask Apple to feature your app

Since November 2024 there has been a front door. Featuring Nominations in App Store Connect lets you tell Apple's editorial team about a launch, an update or a piece of new content, with a minimum lead time of three weeks. It is not a request form with a yes or no at the end — it is context, delivered to the people who fill the shelves.

Where the form lives, and who can use it

In App Store Connect, nominations sit alongside your apps rather than inside any one of them — Apple's help page is the canonical walkthrough. The role requirement catches people out:

The three-week rule

Apple's wording is a request, not a suggestion:

Three weeks is the floor, not the target. Editorial calendars are planned further out than that, and a nomination that arrives the week before your launch is competing for space that is already allocated. If your date is fixed — a hardware tie-in, a season, a conference — four to six weeks is a kinder ask.

What the form asks for

Plan the answers before you open it. In order:

• Nomination name — internal, for your own reference.
• Type — one of App Launch, New Content, or App Enhancements.
• Description — the substance. Apple asks you to be explicit about the purpose of the nomination, how you rank its priority, what specifically is new, and what the new functionality is for.
• Related apps — up to 10 from the same account.
• Platforms — note that In-App Events can only be attached for iPhone and iPad.
• Countries or regions — pre-filled from your availability, and editable. This field matters more than it looks; see below.
• Localizations — also pre-filled from availability, also editable.
• In-App Events — you can attach approved or published events.
• Supplemental materials — up to 5 URLs. A press kit, a demo video, a TestFlight build.
• Helpful details — accessibility work, inclusivity, anything genuinely unusual about the app.
• Publish date — a specific date or a range.

What happens next: nothing visible

This is the part worth setting expectations about. There is no approved or rejected state to refresh. Apple's help page says only that the editorial team will consider your plans for potential featuring opportunities; it makes no promise of a reply and gives no decision timeline.

So how do you find out? For a slice of placements, Apple tells you: a notification via the App Store Connect app if you land in select placements on the Today tab. For everything else — the Apps tab, the Games tab, category shelves, and all 171 storefronts — you find out by looking. That gap is the subject of how to know when your app is featured.

Nominations are one door, and not the widest one

It is easy to read “Featuring Nominations” as the mechanism. It isn't. Editors fill most shelves themselves, browsing the store the way anyone else does — and there are a lot of shelves to fill. Every one of the 171 storefronts has a Today, an Apps and a Games tab, each a stack of named editorial collections: “Best New Apps and Updates”, “Editors' Choice Apps”, “Apps You Might've Missed”, “Tap Into Apple Intelligence” and dozens more, in dozens of languages.

The number of editorial slots filled every day is enormous, and the great majority of them have no nomination anywhere in the story. Many of those shelf names are also standing collections that refresh on a cycle, which is why an app that has been featured once tends to be featured again — and why a featuring record is worth having before you nominate.

What actually improves the odds

None of this is secret, and all of it is slower than a form:

• Look like the store. Editors feature apps that look at home next to the ones they already picked. Current platform conventions, a real icon, screenshots that show the app rather than a marketing collage.
• Adopt the new thing early. Shelves like “Tap Into Apple Intelligence” and “Do More With Apple Watch” exist because Apple needs apps to point at. A well-built widget, Control, Live Activity or watch app is a category of shelf you become eligible for.
• Localise properly. Not machine-translated metadata — a genuinely localised app is what a local editor can justify picking.
• Do the accessibility work, and mention it in the Helpful Details field. Apple features accessible apps deliberately and repeatedly.
• Ship on a rhythm. “Best New Apps and Updates” is a shelf about updates. An app that ships nothing for a year is eligible for fewer shelves than one that ships.

Frequently asked