The part almost everyone reads

Above the Fold

The App Store hides your description behind a “more” link, and almost nobody taps it. Whatever sits above that cut is, in practice, the whole description — so this shows you exactly where it lands.

0/4000 characters

Why only the opening matters

A description can run to 4,000 characters, and the product page shows a few lines of it. Everything after that is behind a tap most readers never make, which makes the first two sentences roughly the entire listing as far as conversion is concerned. Load an app above, or paste a draft.

How much of your description shows before “more”?

App Store product pages cut the description after a few lines and hide the rest behind a tap. Most people never take it. This renders your text at three phone widths and shows exactly where the cut lands.

You can load any app’s live description, or paste a draft — the draft case is the useful one, because the point is to fix the copy before you ship it.

How it works

  1. 1Load an app or paste your text.
  2. 2An off-screen probe at the same width and font is filled by binary search until it exceeds the visible line budget, so the cut point is MEASURED rather than assumed.
  3. 3The preview uses the same whitespace handling as the product page, so your own hard line breaks consume visible lines exactly as they do on the App Store.
  4. 4A structure check flags stock opening phrases, an over-long first sentence, a bloated first paragraph and an opening that starts on bullets.

What it cannot tell you

  • There is no character count for the cut, and there could not be. Where the text breaks depends on device width, the reader’s Dynamic Type setting and the script — a fixed rule would be roughly 40% wrong on a small phone.
  • There is no score. Whether an opening line is worth reading is a judgement about the product, and a number over judgement only teaches people to write for the checker.
  • It shows the App Store’s truncation, not Google’s. Search snippets are a separate budget.

Frequently asked questions

How many characters of an App Store description are visible?

Apple publishes no number, and there cannot be a single one — it depends on device width, the reader’s text size setting and the language. This page measures it for the width you choose instead of quoting a rule.

Why does my description show so little?

Usually a hard line break. Measured on a real listing, a 2,612-character description showed 115 characters — 4% — because its first line ended in a newline, pushing everything else behind the tap.

Does the description affect App Store search ranking?

No. Apple indexes the app name, subtitle and keyword field. The description is read by people, which is exactly why the opening lines matter so much.