I didn’t expect this to be the part of shipping an app that drove me crazy, but App Store preview videos ended up being way more painful than I thought they would be.

At first it seemed simple. Record a screen capture, upload it to App Store Connect, and move on. But that is not how it played out for me. I kept getting preview videos rejected and the error messages were incredibly vague. It would just say something like “invalid preview video” without really explaining what was wrong.

After digging into Apple’s documentation I realized how many very specific requirements there are. The resolution has to match exact device dimensions, the frame rate needs to be exactly 30fps, Apple expects a stereo audio track even if the video has no sound, the video has to be between 15 and 30 seconds, and certain codec settings will get rejected even though the video plays perfectly everywhere else.

Someone suggested using ffmpeg to handle the formatting. I had never even heard of ffmpeg before this, so that turned into another rabbit hole. I basically spent hours Googling commands, trying flags I didn’t understand, re encoding videos, uploading again, getting rejected again, and repeating that process.

At some point I realized I was spending way more time fighting video specs than actually working on the app I was trying to ship.

So I ended up building a small platform that automates the process. You upload a screen recording and it formats it so it passes App Store Connect validation.

If this is something other developers run into as well, I would genuinely love feedback. I am still improving it and would love to hear what would make something like this actually useful.

Why are App Store preview videos so hard to get uploaded?