Design your app screenshots for app store search, not for the detail page.

The first three frames do most of the work

Apple is direct about this. Depending on the orientation of your screenshots, the first one to three images appear in search results when no app preview is available, so those images have to carry the essence of the app. Each screenshot after them should focus on one main benefit or feature. You can show up to ten on the product page, and most apps have nowhere near ten things worth saying.

So order the set by what a stranger needs, not by the order the screens appear in the app. Frame one is the single job the app does, in use, with real content on screen. Frame two is the moment it beats the way they do it today: the receipt that scans itself, the shift somebody else picked up, the bill already split. Frame three is proof that the thing keeps working after day one: a history, a total, a streak, a result that only exists once the app has been used for a week.

There is a floor under this from the review side. Guideline 2.3.3 says screenshots should show the app in use, and not merely the title art, login page or splash screen. A splash frame is not only weak marketing, it is the sort of thing that comes back from review. The same search row carries the icon that sits beside them, doing the identical job in miniature, and it deserves its own pass.

Apple, App Store product page

What actually goes inside a frame

Fill the app before you shoot it. Three tasks in a planner looks abandoned. A realistic week in a planner looks used. Populate a demo account with the names, amounts, dates and photos a real customer would have, then capture from that account. This is also the moment when the screens you drew as a mobile app wireframe either hold up or admit that your main screen has nothing on it worth photographing.

Captions are allowed, and they change the whole set. Guideline 2.3.3 permits text and image overlays, and a caption is what turns a picture of a screen into a claim. One idea per frame. Six words or fewer. Put it at the top, where the crop in the search row cannot eat it, and set it large enough to read at thumbnail size, which is smaller than you think. Split a bill in two taps beats Our app makes bill splitting easy, every single time.

Capture from the build you are shipping. A set taken from a version two releases old drifts away from the app it describes, and metadata that matches the app is a review requirement rather than a nicety. If testers already have the current build through ios testflight, take the captures from that same build, and keep the raw files in the repo so the next set starts from something instead of from nothing.

The App Store screenshot requirements, as they stand

The required list is much shorter than most guides make it. Apple requires screenshots for the 6.9-inch iPhone display. The 6.5-inch entry is required only if your app runs on iPhone and screenshots for the 6.9-inch display are not provided. iPad has one requirement, a 13-inch display set, and only if the app runs on iPad. Mac, Apple TV, Apple Watch and Apple Vision Pro carry their own required entries if you ship to those platforms.

Sizes you leave empty are filled by scaling the larger set down, which is why a single good iPhone set covers the iPhone slots. You can upload 1 to 10 screenshots per size, per localisation, as .jpg, .jpeg or .png. Images cannot include alpha channels or transparencies, so flatten anything exported from a design tool on a transparent background before you upload it.

Screenshot sizes for the App Store do change, and older articles still ask for five or six separate iPhone sets that the current specification does not list. Read the specification page before you build an export pipeline around a list, because the pipeline is the expensive thing to redo.

Apple, App Store Connect screenshot specifications

Localising the set, then finding out if it worked

Apple asks you to localise the description, keywords, app previews and screenshots for each market where the app is offered, and every localisation carries its own set of up to ten images. Translating the captions is the visible half of that. The invisible half sits inside the screens: currency, date format, example names and addresses, and string length, since translated text often runs longer than the English it replaced and quietly breaks a layout that was tuned by eye.

This is the argument for producing screenshots with a repeatable capture rather than a folder of hand-edited files. When the caption layer, the device frame and the language are separate inputs, a new language is an afternoon. When every frame is a flattened export, a new language is the entire job again. Decide early which markets earn a real set, because a localised set for a country with no installs is expensive decoration.

Then find out whether the set works instead of arguing about it. Product Page Optimization in App Store Connect runs up to three alternative treatments against your current page, for up to 90 days or until you stop it, on a share of traffic you choose. App Analytics reports impressions, conversion rate, improvement and a confidence level for each treatment, and Apple suggests waiting for high confidence before adopting one. Custom product pages are the other half of the same idea: separate versions of the page with their own screenshots and promotional text, each on its own URL, so a campaign can land on a set built for it.