App Store screenshot sizes and specifications

The one thing to understand first

Apple does not expect you to produce a screenshot set for every iPhone ever made. It expects you to produce a set at the largest current display size, and it will scale that set down for smaller devices automatically.

This is why listings in the wild look simpler than the spec tables suggest. Most apps ship one iPhone set and one iPad set, and let Apple do the rest. If you're rebuilding a listing and panicking about how many variants you need, the answer is usually two.

The sizes you'll actually encounter

Pull apart a handful of real listings and the same numbers keep appearing:

Landscape variants of each are accepted, a game will typically ship those instead. The pixel counts are the same, transposed.

The icon deserves a note

The 1024×1024 icon is supplied square and flat. You do not round the corners and you do not add transparency, Apple applies the rounded mask itself, at every size it renders. Supply a pre-rounded icon and you get an ugly double-rounded result with artefacts in the corners.

How many screenshots, and does order matter

You can supply up to ten per device class. Almost nobody should.

The reason is the fold. On a phone browsing the App Store, a user sees roughly the first two to three screenshots without scrolling, and a substantial share of people never scroll at all. Whatever your product's single most persuasive idea is, it needs to be in slides one and two. Slides seven through ten are, for most listings, decoration.

So the practical advice is: front-load ruthlessly. Treat the first two slides as the entire pitch and everything after as supporting material for the minority who scroll.

What real listings look like

Rip any large consumer app and you'll typically find eight iPhone screenshots and eight iPad screenshots, the same creative concept, re-laid-out for the wider canvas rather than simply stretched.

That last point is the one teams get wrong. An iPad screenshot is not a phone screenshot scaled up. The aspect ratio is dramatically different (2048×2732 is far squarer than 1284×2778), so text set for a tall narrow frame becomes stranded in a sea of empty space when it's transposed. Good iPad sets are re-composed, not re-exported.

Naming, and why it's worth caring

Apple's image CDN preserves the filename of whatever was uploaded. That means a listing's URLs quietly leak the design team's naming convention, and real-world names tend to look like this:

EC-15030-WH-UK-Offer-R30-CPP-UK-iOS-6.5-1284x2778-S01.jpg

Campaign code, market, platform, device class, dimensions, slide number. When you're reconciling live assets against source files or a campaign brief months later, that string does an enormous amount of work. If your team doesn't name assets like this, it's a cheap habit to adopt.

Auditing what's actually live

A listing drifts. Slides get replaced piecemeal, a promotional set goes up for a campaign and never comes down, and the iPad set quietly rots because nobody looks at it.

The fastest way to audit is to pull everything currently live at full resolution and put it side by side. The tool will do that in one paste, and it groups by device, so a neglected iPad set is immediately obvious.

For the Google Play equivalents, including the 1024×500 feature graphic, which has no Apple counterpart, see the Play asset specifications.