Most screenshot advice ends where the file begins. Teams spend days on layout, copy, and localization, export whatever format their design tool defaults to — and then discover the real gate: a set of file-level rules that both Apple and Google enforce automatically at upload. Get them wrong and your release stalls on a red error banner, not a design review.

The specs are not exotic. They are just rarely written down in one place, and they change more often than teams expect. This article collects the format-level requirements for App Store and Google Play screenshots from primary sources — Apple's App Store Connect Help reference, Google's Android Developers publications, and Google's own image-compression research — all verified against the live documentation in October 2026.

By the numbers

Before the detail, the headline constraints, each traceable to a named primary source:

  • 10 — maximum screenshots per device size on the App Store, with a minimum of one required (Apple App Store Connect Help, "Screenshot specifications").
  • 3 — accepted screenshot formats on the App Store: .jpeg, .jpg, and .png. Nothing else ships.
  • 0 — alpha channels or transparency allowed. Apple's spec page states it verbatim: "Images can't include alpha channels or transparencies."
  • 8 — maximum phone screenshots on Google Play, versus Apple's 10 (Google Play Console current guidelines).
  • 25–34% — smaller files at equal quality (SSIM index) for WebP versus JPEG in Google's compression study — relevant when you optimize source assets before export.
  • April 2027 — the deadline after which apps built on the iOS 27.1 SDK must include iPhone Duo screenshots, per Apple's spec page.
  • +3.5% — average monthly-active-user lift Google measured for titles using custom store listings (internal comparative analysis, November 2022 data) — a reminder that listing changes, including refreshed imagery, are revenue-relevant work worth not stalling on.
  • ~30% — year-over-year growth in active non-phone Android devices reported by Google's Play team in late 2022, which is why form-factor-specific screenshot sets keep expanding.

What Apple accepts: JPEG and PNG only, at exact sizes

Apple's App Store Connect documentation is blunt: "You must include at least one screenshot and can upload up to 10 screenshots per device size in .jpeg, .jpg, or .png formats." That's the entire format menu. TIFF, WebP, HEIC exports from your design tool, PDFs — none of them upload.

Two structural rules ride along:

  1. At least one screenshot is required for the "medium display" iPhone with Dynamic Island class, and if your app supports iPadOS, at least one for the iPad 13-inch display. Everything beyond the required size is optional capacity — but optional only until Apple scales or surfaces it.
  2. Display scaling is automatic. If your UI is consistent across sizes, Apple says you only need to provide screenshots at the highest required resolution; App Store Connect scales them down for smaller displays. Per-device and per-localization uploads are optional overrides.

The honest reading of the size table (verified October 2026) is that it keeps growing. The current ladder includes:

  • iPhone with Dynamic Island, medium display: 1179 × 2556 or 1206 × 2622 portrait
  • iPhone with Dynamic Island, large display: 1290 × 2796 or 1320 × 2868 portrait
  • A newer 6.6-inch class: 1260 × 2736 portrait (accepted alongside the large-display sizes)
  • iPad 13-inch displays: 2064 × 2752 portrait (now the required iPad class)
  • iPad 11-inch displays: 1668 × 2420 portrait
  • Legacy Face ID phones, if your binary still runs on them: 1284 × 2778 and 1242 × 2688 portrait
  • Apple Watch classes down to 396 × 484 (newer models) and even 312 × 390 for legacy Series 3 devices
  • iPhone Duo: 1398 × 2034 (outer display) and 2007 × 2853 (inner display) — exportable today, voluntary until April 2027, when they become required for apps on the iOS 27.1 SDK; Apple notes submissions get a product-page badge marking Duo optimization

And the alpha rule, quoted for the record: "Images can't include alpha channels or transparencies." This is the single most common file-level rejection we see in the wild, and it has a boring root cause.

The alpha-channel trap: why clean renders fail

A PNG that looks fine in a viewer can still carry an invisible alpha channel. Design tools, web exporters, and screenshot-annotation pipelines frequently emit RGBA PNGs even when every pixel is fully opaque. The color mode is structural — the extra channel is in the file whether or not it visibly does anything — and App Store Connect rejects it at upload rather than at review.

Google Play enforces a sibling rule: screenshots must be JPEG or 24-bit PNG, and 24-bit PNG means no alpha. Play's 320-pixel minimum and 3840-pixel maximum dimension bounds are generous, but the bit-depth rule means 32-bit RGBA exports fail the same way Apple's do.

The fix is unglamorous but mechanical:

  1. Flatten to RGB (or grayscale) before final export — drop the alpha channel entirely, don't just make it opaque.
  2. If your pipeline composites device frames or captions over captures, run the flatten at the final encode step, after all layers are merged — exports that strip the alpha only at the final PNG encode stay compliant even when earlier layers carry it, because the failure mode is invisible until the store rejects the file.
  3. Re-check after any tooling change. A new Figma plugin, a new capture script, or a new compression step can silently reintroduce the channel.

There's a related legacy habit worth killing while you're in there: Apple's own legacy documentation for promoted in-app-purchase images specified "72 dpi, RGB, flattened and no rounded corners," and its in-app-event media specs accept .jpg/.jpeg/.png up to 500MB per file. DPI metadata is ignored by the stores' pipelines, but "flattened" keeps appearing in Apple's asset specs — the habit of shipping flattened RGB files protects you across every surface, not just screenshots.

JPEG vs PNG for store screenshots: pick by content

Both stores accept both formats, so the choice is yours. The right rule-of-thumb is content-driven, and Google's WebP compression study gives the supporting arithmetic.

  • UI-heavy screenshots with flat color regions, text, and crisp edges: PNG wins. Lossless encoding keeps text sharp with no ringing artifacts around glyphs — which matters because screenshot overlays are typically rendered at large sizes and then scaled down on the product page.
  • Photographic or gradient-heavy screenshots: JPEG at a high quality setting (80+) is dramatically smaller, and the artifacts it introduces in flat regions are usually invisible at store display sizes.
  • Gradients on PNG: large gradients inflate PNG-24 files heavily with little visual benefit. If a gradient fills the background and JPEG banding is acceptable at quality 80–85, JPEG can cut file size by multiples.

Google's study of WebP — a format you'll use internally if anywhere — found it "achieves 25%-34% smaller file sizes compared to JPEG at the same Structural Similarity (SSIM) index," and consistently required fewer bits per pixel. Neither store accepts WebP for screenshots as of this writing — Apple's accepted list is .jpeg/.jpg/.png, and Play is JPEG or 24-bit PNG — but the study's lesson transfers: aggressive lossy compression at matched perceptual quality is where the big wins are. Use it on source assets and internal pipelines; keep deliverables in the two formats each store actually accepts.

One caveat in the other direction: don't ship maximum-compression JPEGs. Store-side processing re-encodes and scales your images for thumbnails and carousels; if your upload is already artifact-heavy, every downstream scaling pass compounds it. Quality 80–90 JPEG and palette-optimized PNG are the practical sweet spots.

Size ladders without the guesswork

The size table is where format choices meet logistics. Three rules make it manageable:

  1. Design once at the top of the ladder. Apple's scaling note means a single 1320 × 2868 (or 1290 × 2796) master set covers every Face ID-era and Dynamic Island phone class down-scale. If your UI differs meaningfully between small and large phones — bigger type targets, rearranged captions — that's when per-size uploads earn their cost.
  2. Match aspect ratio before pixel dimensions. Within a display class, Apple accepts specific portrait/landscape pairs. The 6.7-inch legacy class, for example, lists 1284 × 2778 and 1242 × 2688 as both accepted portrait specs. Exporting at a near-miss size (say, 1170 × 2532 for a class that wants 1179 × 2556) triggers auto-scaling that can soften text noticeably.
  3. Watch the form-factor frontier. Google's Play team reported active non-phone Android devices grew almost 30% in a single year, and Play now supports device-specific screenshot sets — including Chromebook screenshots at 16:9 aspect, dimensions 1080–7690 pixels, up to 8 — that appear on Play homepages rather than only on your listing. Apple's equivalent expansion is the iPad 13-inch required class and the iPhone Duo pair. Every new surface is one more export target in your pipeline, which is exactly why hardcoding sizes tends to rot: when Apple added the 1260 × 2736 class and promoted iPad 13-inch to required, every frozen template silently fell behind. This is the problem ScreenCraft's device presets exist for — the size library tracks store specs so exports don't have to.

Upload-day checklist

A short pre-flight that catches nearly every file-level rejection:

  1. Formats: .jpeg/.jpg/.png only on the App Store; JPEG or 24-bit PNG on Play. No HEIC, no WebP, no TIFF, no PDF.
  2. Alpha: flatten every export to RGB. Verify the file's color mode structurally (an image inspector, not a visual check), because opaque-looking RGBA is still RGBA.
  3. Counts: 1–10 per App Store device size; up to 8 phone screenshots on Play. Remember Play's feature graphic (1024 × 500) is mandatory and independent of your screenshot set — if you ship both stores, that's a separate asset with its own spec.
  4. Required sizes first: App Store requires iPhone Dynamic Island medium display + iPad 13-inch if you support iPadOS. Upload required classes before optional ones so a partial upload is still a submittable state.
  5. Localization mapping: per-locale screenshot sets are optional but powerful — Apple scales the next-best-language preview automatically. Name files with their locale so the mapping survives bulk uploads.
  6. Duo headroom: iPhone Duo screenshots (1398 × 2034 outer, 2007 × 2853 inner) are voluntary now and required for iOS 27.1-SDK apps from April 2027. If your pipeline can emit them today, budget the set well before the deadline.
  7. Re-verify after tooling changes: format lists and required sizes are the parts of the spec stores change without much ceremony. The current tables here were checked against Apple's App Store Connect Help and Google's Play documentation in October 2026 — re-check against each store's reference before every major release, because both stores update specs without notice.

Nothing here is legal or policy advice — store requirements are enforced by automated upload validation, and the stores' own reference pages are the final word.

Sources

  • Apple, App Store Connect Help — Reference: Screenshot specifications (developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect), verified October 2026. Accepted formats, 1–10 per device size, required sizes, display-scaling rule, alpha/transparency prohibition, and the current size tables including iPhone Duo and the April 2027 requirement.
  • Apple, App Store Connect Help (legacy help.apple.com archive) — promoted in-app-purchase image spec ("1024 × 1024 pixels, 72 dpi, RGB, flattened") and in-app event media specs (.jpg/.jpeg/.png, 500MB max).
  • Google, Android Developers Blog: "Grow user acquisition and store conversions with the updated Play Store Listing Certificate" (September 2023) — custom store listings averaged +3.5% MAU in an internal Google comparative analysis (Nov 2022 data); GameHouse's marketing team reports ~60% acquisition lift from an icon change identified through store-listing experiments; Rocket Game Studio reports 30% faster game launches.
  • Google, Android Developers Blog: "New features and tools to help you showcase your Play Store listing" (October 2022) — ~30% growth in active non-phone Android devices in a year; ChromeOS screenshot support (up to 8 screenshots, 16:9, 1080–7690px).
  • Google Developers: WebP Compression Study — WebP files average 25–34% smaller than JPEG at equivalent SSIM, with consistently fewer bits per pixel.
  • Google Play Console current guidelines (as encoded in ScreenCraft's verified store-spec reference, October 2026) — up to 8 phone screenshots; JPEG or 24-bit PNG without alpha; 1024 × 500 mandatory feature graphic; 320px minimum / 3840px maximum screenshot dimensions.