On a live App Store listing the only selling copy you can still rewrite is app store promotional text, all 170 characters of it.

What Apple will let you change on a live app

Apple splits metadata into two groups and almost nobody reads the second one. The App Store Connect Help reference called Required, localizable, and editable properties defines the first group. These are the properties that can be edited at any time without submitting a new version of your app. Read on 3 October 2026, that reference marks Copyright, App Review information and your app's primary language as editable at any time. It does not mark Name, Subtitle, Support URL, Marketing URL or What's New in this Version.

The other half of the rule is in Apple's app status list. If a status is marked editable, you can edit app metadata while the app has it. Prepare for Submission, Ready for Review, Invalid Binary, Waiting for Review, Rejected, Metadata Rejected and Developer Rejected all carry the mark. Ready for Distribution, the status a live app sits in, does not. That is the real reason you cannot touch the description of a shipped app. It is not a rule about descriptions. It is the status the app is in.

Promotional text is the exception, and Apple's own wording is why. The field informs visitors of any current app features without requiring an updated submission. It appears above the description for customers on iOS 11 or later, and it cannot be longer than 170 characters. It is a version property, not an app property. Open the app, stay on the Distribution tab, pick the version in the sidebar, and the field sits with the other localisable copy under Version Information.

Screenshots follow the status rule instead. Apple states the consequence in one sentence: once your app is submitted for review and approved, you must create a new version to update the screenshots. You get a minimum of one and a maximum of ten per size. Treat them as version assets planned alongside the build, which is a separate job from writing copy and sits in app screenshots for app store.

Apple, App Store Connect Help: platform version information (read 3 October 2026)

Google Play does it the other way round

On Google Play the store listing is not attached to a build. The Main store listing page, under Grow users then Store presence, holds the app name at 30 characters, the short description at 80 and the full description at 4000. Google counts full width and half width characters the same way against those limits. Change any of them and Play Console treats it as a change to review, not as a release. No app bundle is involved. Google documents three text fields there and no equivalent of Apple's promotional text, which it does not need, because the promotional sentence can live in the listing itself. One oddity worth knowing: a note on the same page still refers to a promotional description, but the field table lists only those three.

The cost is the review queue. Google's Publishing overview page gathers updates to your store listings and changes to your store settings into a section of changes not yet sent for review. Nothing moves until you click Send for review. Google says every app change has to be processed before it can be published. Processing can take a few hours or up to seven days, or longer in exceptional cases, depending on the review time your app is subject to. So Google sells you the edit without the build and charges a queue for it. That trade is the piece most app store optimization advice leaves out.

Release notes are the one Google field that behaves like Apple's What's New. You write them while you prepare the release, with language tags on their own lines, and the limit is 500 Unicode characters per language. There is a Copy from a previous release button, which is how teams end up shipping last month's notes. Google also says not to use release notes for promotional purposes or to solicit user actions. The "rate us five stars" line does not belong there.

One detail suggests the field is less frozen than Apple's. Google's managed publishing article lists updating your app's Release notes section among the changes managed publishing does not hold back. What Google does not document is a way to rewrite the notes of a release that has already rolled out to everyone. Write them before you roll out and you never need to find out.

Google Play Console Help, Prepare and roll out a release (read 3 October 2026)

Which change needs what

The useful question is never whether a field is editable. It is what editing it costs you today. There are only four answers across the two stores: free and yours, free but reviewed, needs a release, needs a new version with a build. Promotional text is the only thing in the first bucket, which is why it carries more weight than 170 characters suggests.

Before you panic about a typo that will not go away, check the clock. Apple says updated app information may take up to 24 hours to appear on the App Store or when users install your app. Uploaded app previews can take another 24 hours to process. An edit that has not shown up yet is usually propagation, not failure.

Pick the edit you need and the store you need it on.

The rules that get this copy rejected

Both stores police this text, and they police it in different places. Apple's guideline 2.3.7 limits app names to 30 characters. It also says metadata such as app names, subtitles, screenshots and previews should not include prices, terms or descriptions that are not specific to the metadata type. Promotional text is not named in that list, which fits a field built for copy that expires.

Google is firmer in one place and softer in another, and the distinction matters before you argue with a reviewer. Google's Metadata policy is policy. It says your app title must be 30 characters or less. It also bans text or images in the app title, icon or developer name that indicate store performance or ranking, price or promotional information. The same discouragement of words like Best, Top, Discount and Sale appears for the short description. There it sits under Highly recommended, where Google says failure to comply will not affect your store listing page, though it may limit promotional opportunities. Policy for the title, guidance for the description.

Google adds one line about the short description that reads like advice and is really a warning. Reflect the latest state of your app, and avoid time sensitive copy that can become outdated quickly to reduce the need to update. That is Google saying the listing is editable but the edit is not free. Apple solved the same problem with a separate field.

Then the honest limit. Promotional text is 170 characters above a description most visitors never expand, and neither store publishes a figure for what rewriting it is worth. Apple does not publish a conversion number for promotional text. Google does not publish one for the short description. Any percentage lift you read is somebody's guess. You can measure it on Android, where Play Console runs store listing experiments on text and graphics in up to five languages at once, then fold the result into the slower work of getting more installs.