App Screenshots: What to Include, How Many, and In What Order
A plain guide to app screenshots for the App Store and Google Play — how many you need, accepted sizes, caption rules, and an order that reads well.
App screenshots are the part of your store listing most people actually look at. Descriptions get skipped; images get scrolled. This guide covers the practical questions — how many, what size, what to show, in what order — for both storefronts.
How many screenshots do you need?
- App Store: one to ten screenshots per supported device class (iPhone sizes, iPad sizes). Ten is the ceiling, not a target. A tight set of five that each says one new thing beats ten that repeat.
- Google Play: one to eight phone screenshots, and Google recommends at least four at 1080 x 1920 or larger. Your listing must also include screenshots for other device types you support — 7-inch and 10-inch tablets, Chromebook — so plan for those canvases too.
What size are app screenshots?
Apple accepts only exact dimensions per display class. For example, 6.9-inch iPhone: 1320 x 2868 or 1290 x 2796; 6.5-inch: 1284 x 2778 or 1242 x 2688; 13-inch iPad: 2064 x 2752 or 2048 x 2732. Format is PNG or JPEG, no alpha channel.
Google Play validates by range instead: each side within its pixel bounds and an aspect ratio around 2:1 or less. The separate feature graphic (1024 x 500) is not a screenshot — keep it its own asset.
The full walkthrough lives in App Store Screenshot Sizes. Check Apple's current specifications and Google Play's asset requirements before export, because accepted device classes change over time.
What should the screenshots show?
Real screens from the current build. Each image should answer one question a shopper would ask:
- What is this for? The outcome, shown on the screen where it happens.
- What does using it look like? The core flow, cropped so the action is legible.
- Why this one and not the other app? Your differentiator, as an actual interface.
- How does it fit my day? A routine view — home screen widget, reminder, shared workspace.
- What happens after I install? Onboarding, first-run, or the reassurance detail.
That is a sequence, not a quota. Cut any image that repeats a previous claim.
Caption rules that survive small previews
- Write the promise, not the feature name. "Never lose a draft" beats "cloud sync enabled".
- Keep type large enough to read in a phone search result, because that is where most people first see it.
- Do not stuff keywords. The App Store keyword field and subtitle do that job; a screenshot covered in search terms just looks like noise.
- Make every claim match what the app actually does today. Store review checks this, and users do too.
The five mistakes we see most
- Showing a login or settings screen as the first image.
- Designing one flat image and scaling it to every device class.
- Same caption structure repeated five times ("Do X with Y" on every slide).
- Placing text where a device frame or the storefront preview will crowd it.
- Shipping a set that depicts features removed since the last build.
A two-minute final check
Preview the set as a horizontal strip: does it read as one story with no repeats? Open each file at full size: is the smallest text sharp, is the screen content real, is the margin clean? Then verify counts, dimensions, and format against the current store pages above.
If you want to build or rebuild a set, the editor applies the size rules for you, and ready-made templates keep the whole sequence visually consistent.