How Much Text to Put on App Store Screenshots
Screenshots are read at 5 seconds and a glance. How much text you add — and how large — determines whether your message lands or disappears. Here is the actual guidance.
There is a common failure mode in app store screenshots that is easy to fall into if you come from a web or print design background: adding too much text because the canvas is large. At export resolution, the design looks fine. On a phone in the App Store — where your screenshot appears at a fraction of its native size, in a list alongside competitors — a screenshot packed with text becomes unreadable noise.
Getting the text amount and size right is a technical decision as much as a creative one.
How users see your screenshots
There are two contexts where your screenshots appear:
- Search result thumbnails — your first screenshot appears next to your icon at roughly 140 × 290 pt on a modern iPhone screen. This is about 40% of the phone's width.
- Product page — screenshots are displayed wider, but users scroll quickly. Eye-tracking data shows most users spend under 5 seconds on the full screenshot set before deciding.
The search result thumbnail context is the most demanding. Text that is perfectly legible at product-page size may be completely illegible in the thumbnail. If your caption does not read clearly as a thumbnail, it adds no value in the most important placement.
Minimum readable font sizes
As a practical rule for the 6.9" canvas (1320 × 2868 px):
- Headline / main caption: minimum 90–100 px (displayed as ~32–36 pt on device). Anything smaller will be unreadable in search result thumbnails.
- Subhead / supporting text: minimum 60–70 px. Readable on product page; borderline in search thumbnails.
- Body copy / bullet points: minimum 50 px, but consider whether body copy belongs on a screenshot at all.
- Fine print / legal: 36 px or smaller is below readable on-device. Do not put legal text on screenshots.
The thumbnail test
Before shipping a screenshot, resize it in your design tool to 140 × 290 pt and look at it at actual iPhone screen size. If the caption is not legible at a glance, make the font larger or the caption shorter.
How many text elements per screenshot
The rule that consistently produces better conversions: one message per screenshot. One headline, optionally one subhead. That is it.
Three-line captions with a headline, a subhead, and a benefit bullet list are three competing messages. Users do not parse them all — they absorb the first two words of the largest text and move on. The additional copy adds visual clutter without adding persuasion.
- Best: large headline only ("Never lose a note again").
- Good: headline + one-line subhead ("Smart capture for everything" / "Audio, text, images — searchable instantly").
- Avoid: headline + subhead + bullet list.
- Never: paragraphs of text on a screenshot.
Text and the app UI: which should dominate
App screenshots typically have two layers: the app UI (the actual screen content) and an overlay of caption text. The proportion of each depends on the screenshot style:
- UI-first: large phone mockup showing real app content, caption text in a small strip at top or bottom. Works well for productivity, utility, and finance apps where the interface itself communicates quality.
- Caption-first: bold headline fills most of the canvas, app UI is smaller or cropped. Works well for apps with a strong verbal benefit promise — habit trackers, fitness apps, social tools.
Avoid the middle ground where the caption and the UI compete for prominence at roughly equal size — the user's eye has nowhere to land.
Text and localization: the expansion problem
German can run 30–40% longer than the same English phrase. Finnish and Polish run similarly long. A five-word English headline that fits perfectly in your design may be an eight-word German headline that does not.
Two solutions:
- 1Design with overflow headroom — size your English text so there is room for a 40% longer translation without breaking the layout.
- 2Auto-scale per language — use a tool that automatically reduces the font size for long translations until the text fits the defined text box.
Japanese and Chinese are the other extreme: they pack more meaning per character, so translations can be significantly shorter than English. Designs built purely around English caption length may feel sparse in CJK languages.
Boom Screens handles text overflow and font scaling automatically per language — if German needs a smaller font to fit, it scales it down; if Japanese is shorter than expected, the layout adjusts.
Write less. Make it bigger.
Boom Screens localizes your short, punchy captions into all App Store Connect languages — with automatic font scaling that keeps every language's text legible. Try it free.