Google Play asset specifications

Play asks for three distinct things

Unlike the App Store, a Play listing is built from three separate kinds of image, and they serve genuinely different purposes. Teams tend to get the screenshots right and then treat the other two as afterthoughts, which is a mistake, the other two are what Play shows people who haven't reached your listing yet.

Play is considerably more relaxed than Apple about screenshot dimensions. Rather than prescribing exact pixel counts per device, it works to minimum and maximum bounds and a permitted aspect-ratio range. In practice most developers simply reuse their iOS set, which is why you'll so often find 1284×2778 images on a Play listing, a resolution that corresponds to no Android phone in particular.

The feature graphic is the one you're neglecting

The 1024×500 feature graphic has no App Store equivalent, and it is the single most commonly-rotted asset on Play.

Two reasons. First, it never appears in the screenshot carousel, so it isn't in front of you when you're reviewing the listing. Second, it's the asset most likely to have been produced once, at launch, by someone who has since left.

Go and look at yours. In our experience it is frequently a full brand generation behind everything else on the listing, old logo, old palette, a tagline nobody uses any more. It's a cheap fix and a visible one.

Design it assuming it will be cropped

The feature graphic is displayed at different crops across Play's surfaces. Anything critical, logo, product name, a face, needs to live near the centre. Type pushed to the edges is type that will be sliced off somewhere you aren't looking.

The icon: 512×512, and let Play do the shaping

Supply the icon square and full-bleed. Android applies its own adaptive masking, circle, squircle, rounded square, depending on the launcher, so a pre-rounded icon with baked-in transparency will be masked again and look wrong.

Keep meaningful content away from the extreme corners, because you cannot predict which mask a given device will apply.

Screenshots: how many, and in what order

You can supply up to eight. As on the App Store, the first two do nearly all the work, because that's what's visible before a scroll.

The best-performing Play sets we see treat the first slide as a headline rather than a screenshot: a single clear claim, large type, a device frame if it helps. The temptation to lead with an un-annotated screen capture of your home page is strong and should be resisted, it says nothing to someone who doesn't already know what the app does.

Tablet screenshots: the toggles are lying to you

This deserves its own section because it confuses almost everybody.

Play listings display Phone / Tablet / Chromebook toggles. These look like three separate asset sets. Usually they are not. If the developer uploaded only a phone set, the overwhelmingly common case, Play simply letterboxes those same phone images into a tablet frame and shows them behind the other tabs.

We verified this on a major UK app: identical image IDs behind all three toggles, and refetching the page with tablet and Chromebook user-agents returned the same files. One set, three tabs.

So there are two takeaways. If you're downloading, don't waste time hunting for tablet artwork that was never uploaded. And if you're publishing, understand that those empty toggles are a real gap: Play surfaces tablet-optimised listings preferentially to tablet users, and letterboxed phone screenshots are not that.

Pulling the current set

To audit what's actually live, paste your listing into the tool. It returns the screenshots, the 512×512 icon and the feature graphic at native resolution, grouped and labelled, and it will split out genuine tablet sets on the rare listings that have them.

If you want to understand the mechanics rather than just the numbers, the download guide explains how Play's image CDN works and why =s0 is the magic word.