Visuals, and how to test them
The decision on a store page is made within seconds, and visuals drive most of it. Text is secondary — most people never open the description.
The official limits:
- iOS: up to 10 screenshots. Apple notes that when there is no app preview video, depending on screenshot orientation the first one to three images appear in search results
- iOS app previews: up to 3 videos, each up to 30 seconds. Videos autoplay with muted audio — which is why Apple advises making the first few seconds visually compelling
- Play: up to 8 screenshots per supported device type; the app icon is a 512×512 px PNG
The key practical consequence: the first one to three screenshots do all the work. People see them in search results and often never open the page. The remaining seven are only for someone already interested.
| Element | What to do | What to avoid |
|---|---|---|
| Icon | A simple shape, one strong colour, recognisable at small size | Fine detail, text inside the icon, the same grey-blue as everyone else |
| 1st screenshot | States the core benefit in words — not just a raw screen capture | An empty login screen, an interface nobody can parse |
| 2nd-3rd screenshot | The two strongest features, one sentence each | Cramming every feature into one image |
| Preview video | Show the outcome in the first 3 seconds (it plays muted) | Opening with a logo animation |
| Text size | A font size that stays readable when shrunk on a phone screen | Tiny text that looks good in the design tool and is unreadable on a phone |
Do not guess your visuals — test them. Both stores have their own testing tool, and both are free:
Apple — Product Page Optimization. Per Apple's documentation you test up to three alternate versions against your original; icons, screenshots and app previews can be tested, results appear in App Analytics, and you then set the best performer as the page everyone sees.
Google Play — store listing experiments. Google writes that per app you can run one default graphics experiment or up to five localized experiments at the same time. A default graphics experiment tests variants of the icon, feature graphic and screenshots; a localized experiment can additionally test description text.
Custom product pages (Apple). Per Apple you can publish up to 70 additional product pages for the same app, each with its own unique URL. That means showing one set of screenshots to someone arriving from TikTok and a different set to someone arriving from Instagram — a page matched to the traffic source.
Apple's own documentation gives a real example: a developer tested the hypothesis "adding a video will raise conversion" and got the opposite — the original page without a video performed better. That is exactly why you test: your taste is not user behaviour.
Practice. Show your first three screenshots to a friend on a phone, at search-result size, for three seconds, then hide the phone. Ask: "What does this app do?" Done means: at least two out of three answer correctly. If they cannot — it was your explanation doing the work, not the screenshots.
📚 Sources and documentation
- Creating your App Store product pageofficialdeveloper.apple.com
The 10 screenshots, 3 previews, 30-second limit, and the first 1-3 images appearing in search.
- Product page optimizationofficialdeveloper.apple.com
Testing up to three alternate treatments — with real worked examples.
- Run A/B tests on your store listingofficialsupport.google.com
One default or up to five localized experiments on the Play side.
- Custom product pages on the App Storeofficialdeveloper.apple.com
Up to 70 additional pages, each with its own URL — different screenshots per channel.