What the Play Console accepts
Screenshots are the second thing a visitor sees after the icon, and Play is exacting about dimensions. Get them wrong and the upload is refused at the moment you are trying to ship.
| Asset | Typical size | Rules |
|---|---|---|
| Phone screenshots | 1080 × 1920 | 2–8 of them; 320–3840 px per side |
| 7-inch tablet | 1200 × 1920 | Needed to be shown as tablet-ready |
| 10-inch tablet | 1600 × 2560 | Same |
| Feature graphic | 1024 × 500, exactly | One, no transparency |
The rule that catches people is aspect ratio: no side may exceed twice the other, so a tall capture from a 20:9 phone can be refused outright. That is why padding is the default here.
Pad or crop?
Padding keeps the whole screen and adds a coloured border to reach the target ratio — nothing lost, everything legible, and a consistent brand colour looks deliberate. Cropping fills the frame and discards what does not fit, usually the top and bottom where the header and navigation live. For a converted website, padding is almost always right: the content is text and layout, and losing the top loses the point.
The feature graphic is its own thing
1024 × 500, exactly one, shown at the top of the listing and in promotional slots — sometimes with a play button over it, sometimes cropped on narrow screens. Keep important text away from the edges and the centre, and do not just scale a screenshot into it: a simple graphic with the icon, the name and one short line works far better at that shape.
What to capture
- Lead with the main screen — the first image is the only one most people see.
- One idea per image — browse, search, checkout, track.
- Real content — placeholder products read as unfinished, and Play rejects placeholder assets.
- A short caption in the padding, if you are padding anyway.
- Not the login screen — nobody installs for a sign-in page.
Capturing them
Use a real device where you can (volume-down + power on most Android phones) to get the true status bar, fonts and rendering. Before you have an installable build, a desktop browser at phone width is a fair stand-in, though it lacks the Android chrome that makes a capture look like an app. Whatever the source, resize here: five targets across eight screenshots is forty manual exports otherwise.