Two short-drama apps are running App Store ads that start before Apple's data does. ReelShort's Portuguese creative, "Curtas ilimitados em movimento", and DramaWave's English one, "Drama Shorts, TV Series&Reels", both sit at the far edge of the repository with no measurable first day inside it, and both were still recorded on 22 July 2026. Apple publishes about a trailing year, so the honest way to state it is that each of those ads has run longer than a year and we cannot say by how much.
That is the top of the survivor board. We pulled every App Store ad six short-drama apps ran across all 25 EU storefronts from Apple's public Ad Repository, the transparency dataset the Digital Services Act requires, with the window ending 23 July 2026. The board below is sorted by how long each app's oldest creative has stayed live.
The survivor board
| App | Records | Storefronts | Distinct creatives | Longest-running creative |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ReelShort | 1,316 | 23 | 10 | past a year, last recorded 22 July |
| DramaWave | 1,139 | 22 | 16 | past a year, last recorded 22 July |
| DramaBox | 3,153 | 25 | 12 | 302 days |
| GoodShort | 2,652 | 24 | 10 | 263 days |
| NetShort | 3,612 | 25 | 24 | 257 days |
| ShortMax | 38 | 11 | 13 | 17 days |
Every longevity number here is higher than the one we published on 15 July, and the sweep is the reason. That version sampled five storefronts, so it measured each app's oldest creative only in the markets it happened to look at. Widening to all 25 finds the storefronts where the oldest creative actually runs, and the spans stretch: ReelShort from 319 days to past a year, DramaWave from 249 days to past a year, DramaBox from 172 to 302, NetShort from 151 to 257, GoodShort from 99 to 263.
What the board says once you read down it:
- ReelShort holds the oldest ad in the category, in Portuguese. Ten distinct creatives, and the survivor is a market-specific line rather than its English one. Its English line, "Unlimited Shorts on the Go", is close behind at 352 days across 18 storefronts, with an icon-only cut of the same line at 349.
- DramaWave tests the widest. Sixteen creatives, and the year-plus English line runs in 13 countries. Two more variants of that same line have already stopped, last recorded on 1 October and 3 September 2025, so DramaWave keeps several cuts of one winner alive and retires the ones that fade.
- DramaBox climbed the most. Its English line, "Hub of Shorts. Watch on the Go", is at 302 days across 19 countries. Its Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and French lines all start within five days of each other in the third week of January 2026, so that part of the set went live in one push, with German already running since December.
- NetShort buys the most and tests the most. 3,612 records, the heaviest in the category, and 24 creatives. Its English line, "Exclusive Short Drama Video！", runs in all 25 EU storefronts at once, the only creative in this set that does.
- GoodShort spends heavily on one idea. 2,652 records across 24 storefronts but only ten creatives, and its 263-day survivor is a single English headline, "Discover Eclectic Drama Now!", running in 20 countries.
Where these apps buy
App Store search results, almost to the exclusion of everything else. ReelShort's 1,141 analyzed placement records are all search results. DramaBox's 1,250 are all search results. NetShort is the one exception in the whole set: out of 1,248 analyzed records, two sit in the App Store search tab, the only browse-style placement anywhere in this category.
So the pattern holds with one asterisk. These apps pay for intent, not discovery. They want the person who already typed "short drama" or a rival app's name, and they have collectively spent almost nothing testing the alternative. Secondhand-shopping apps in the same repository do buy browse placements, which makes the contrast a category choice rather than an Apple restriction. If you run an app here, search results are the slot your rivals have voted for with their budgets, and the browse experiment is still unclaimed.
What the winning copy says
The 25-storefront view shows a two-tier structure that a five-market sample hides. Each app writes local-language headlines for the big markets (Germany and Austria, France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, though only DramaBox covers all five) and then runs one English line across the smaller storefronts, anywhere from 13 to 25 of them depending on the app.
ReelShort by market:
- Germany and Austria: "Kurzserien nonstop genießen"
- France: "Mini-séries à tout moment !"
- Spain: "Shorts Sin Límites"
- Portugal: "Curtas ilimitados em movimento"
- 18 more storefronts, Italy included: "Unlimited Shorts on the Go"
None of the local lines is a literal translation of another, and Italy has no Italian line at all: it sits in ReelShort's English bucket alongside 17 other markets. DramaBox and NetShort both do write Italian ("Guarda Short Drama Quotidiano" and "Video esclusivi di mini-drammi"), so the choice is per advertiser rather than per market.
The two tiers overlap. NetShort's English line runs in all 25 storefronts, including the four that already have their own NetShort translation, so in Portugal both "Exclusive Short Drama Video！" and "Minissérie exclusiva dramática" are live at the same time. GoodShort works the other way and translates one idea outward: "Discover Eclectic Drama Now!" became German in March, Portuguese in May, then Spanish and French in May and June 2026, and each translation is a fresh creative with a short span so far.
If you are writing your first App Store ad for a short-drama app, the tested starting point is a native headline in your biggest markets and one English line for everything else, not one English line pushed everywhere and not 25 translations.
ShortMax, the one we said to watch
Last month's article flagged ShortMax as the new entrant, with 7 records and a 10-day top creative, and said to check whether any of it would age into the survivor board. Here is what happened.
ShortMax went from 7 records to 38, and from 5 storefronts to 11. It now has 13 distinct creatives, three of them new in the final week of the window. On 14 July it swapped its entire message. The first set pitched originals and reels ("Original Dramas, Hit Reels" in English across seven countries, "Original-Serien, Beliebte Reel" in German), and all of it stopped on 16 July, the oldest of those creatives at 17 days. The replacement, live from 14 July, pitches the catalogue and the act of watching: "Stream Mini Series & Reels", "Stream Kurzfilme & Serien", "Ver Doramas, Filmes & Séries", "Ver Series, Películas y TV".
Nothing ShortMax runs has aged past 17 days, so it is not on the survivor board. The prediction was half right: ShortMax did get serious, it more than quintupled its record count and more than doubled its market coverage, and it has produced no survivor. A full message swap after two weeks is the behavior of an advertiser still looking for the line, not one that found it.
How to read this for your own category
Longevity is the cheapest performance signal you can get for free. Nobody keeps funding an ad that loses money, so an ad still live after months is one that converts. Two practical notes from this refresh. First, pull every storefront you can, because a narrow sample understates every span on the board and can point you at the wrong survivor. Second, check the placement mix as well as the copy, because that choice tells you whether your rivals are paying for intent or discovery, and a category-wide gap (browse, here) is worth knowing about before you buy.
Then check monthly. An advertiser with a 17-day top creative and a message it just threw out can look very different by the next pull.
You can pull any advertiser at recao.app, free, no account, in about a minute.
Method note: figures are computed from Apple's public Ad Repository (DSA Article 39). This refresh sweeps all 25 EU storefronts with no failed country queries, data window ending 23 July 2026. The 15 July version of this article sampled five markets (Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Great Britain), and Great Britain sits outside the EU set the repository serves, so it is not part of this sweep. Record counts here are not comparable to that five-market version. Longevity figures are computed identically and are comparable: "days running" is the span from a creative's first to last recorded impression across the markets in the sweep. Creatives whose first record sits at the edge of the published window have run longer than the repository shows, and we report those as past a year rather than assigning a number. Longevity is a proxy for performance, not a measured conversion rate. Refreshed monthly.