Play Store Promotion Needs Four Screenshots

There's a second rule that catches more people. No screenshot can be more than twice as long as it is wide, and most phone captures are.

I read Google's own asset requirements page for both rules rather than a summary, because the aspect ratio limit is the one that blogs keep getting wrong. I checked the arithmetic on a 1080 by 2400 capture myself, and it really is over the line.

This one is easy to miss because nothing stops you publishing with fewer.

You can put up two screenshots, ship the app and never see a warning. The listing works. Installs happen.

What quietly doesn't happen is placement on the surfaces where Google shows apps it's recommending, because those formats need screenshots to fill.

So four is not a suggestion about design. It's the entry ticket to a distribution channel you didn't know you were queueing for.

And it's free. Four images is an evening's work and the shelf space costs nothing.

This is the rule that surprises everyone, so here it is in plain numbers.

Google's limit says the longest side of a screenshot cannot be more than twice the shortest side. So the tallest ratio you can upload is 2:1.

A modern Android phone captures at about 20:9, which is 2.22 to 1.

That means the screenshot your phone just took is taller than the Play Store accepts, straight out of the box.

So every Play Store screenshot is a cropped or padded version of what your phone produced. There is no way around it.

Two honest ways to fix the height, and they suit different images.

Cropping takes a strip off the top or the bottom. If the strip is status bar, navigation bar or empty background, you lose nothing.

Padding adds background above and below the phone frame until the canvas reaches the ratio you want. That's what a mockup does anyway, which is why designed screenshots rarely hit this problem.

So if you're uploading bare captures, crop them. If you're building framed mockups, set the canvas to 1080 by 1920 and the problem disappears before it starts.

What you must not do is squash the image to fit. That distorts every circle on the screen.

You could upload at 2:1 and be legal. Google asks for 9:16 for the promotion formats, and there's a reason worth knowing.

The recommendation surfaces crop your image to fit their own layout. A shape they expect crops predictably. A shape they don't gets cut somewhere you didn't plan.

So designing at 1080 by 1920 means what you see is close to what appears on the shelf.

It's also the shape most templates and frames assume.

Unless you have a specific reason, build at 1080 by 1920 and stop thinking about it.

Worth being clear, because the wording confuses people.

Google names 16:9 landscape and 9:16 portrait as the two accepted shapes for the promotion formats. That's an either or for your set, not a mix.

If your app is portrait, do portrait. If it's a landscape game, do landscape.

What you should not do is upload three portrait images and one landscape one, because the set will look broken wherever it's shown as a row.

Pick one shape and keep every image in it.

There are only four numbers and they cover nearly every upload error.

• Minimum dimension: 320 pixels.
• Maximum dimension: 3840 pixels.
• The long side cannot be more than twice the short side.
• JPEG or 24 bit PNG, and no transparency.

The transparency one is worth repeating because it's silent. A PNG with an alpha channel looks identical on your machine and gets refused at upload.

Export as 24 bit PNG rather than 32 bit and the problem never appears. The full list lives in Google's asset requirements.

Phone screenshots are one slot among several, and the others are usually empty.

Google gives separate slots for tablets and for the larger form factors, and an empty slot means your app shows a phone image stretched across a tablet layout.

That looks poor, and on tablet surfaces it can cost you the placement entirely.

You do not need a redesign for this. A tablet capture of the same screens, framed in a tablet frame, is enough.

If your app genuinely does not support tablets, leave the slot empty rather than filling it with a stretched phone image.

Meeting the requirement and building a good listing are different jobs.

Four images gets you eligible. Most people never scroll past the third, so the first three are where the work belongs.

A sensible set is a strong opener, two that show the core feature doing something, and a fourth that answers the obvious objection.

Anything beyond that is for the minority who scroll, and they're usually already convinced.

We went through what belongs in the opener in our guide to the first screenshot.

One more eligibility point that sits underneath all of this.

Google asks that screenshots demonstrate the actual in app experience and focus on the core features, so a user can anticipate what using it is like.

That rules out a set made entirely of illustration, marketing copy and lifestyle photography with no app screen in it.

Overlays and captions are fine. A caption on top of a real screen is normal and expected.

An image with no app in it at all is the one that gets flagged.

Good news, and it removes most of the pressure from this decision.

Store listing images are metadata, not part of your app build. You can replace them without shipping a new version.

So four decent screenshots today beat four perfect ones in a month. Get eligible, then improve.

Changes go through a review and then appear, usually within a day or two rather than instantly.

Plan a refresh when the app changes visibly, not on a calendar. A screenshot showing an old interface is worse than a plain one showing the current interface.

Worth doing before you design anything new.

Open your Play Console listing and count the phone screenshots. If it's fewer than four, that's the cheapest fix available to you this week.

Then check the pixel size of each one. Anything under 1080 on the short side is below the promotion bar.

Then divide the long side by the short side. If you get more than 2, that image should not have uploaded, and it's worth checking it isn't showing cropped oddly.

Our asset checklist covers the rest of the listing in the same pass.

Set your canvas to 1080 by 1920 and build four images at that size.

Export them as 24 bit PNG with no transparency, then upload all four before you polish anything.

Once the upload passes, improve the first one, because that's the image doing most of the work.

The editor exports at that size directly if you'd rather not set it up by hand.