What to Write on Each App Screenshot

The image on a store screenshot matters less than the sentence on top of it. People scan captions. They rarely study interface details at thumbnail size.

So the captions are the product pitch, delivered three lines at a time.

Frame one: what it is

This frame appears alone in search results, next to your competitors.

One sentence describing what the app does. Not the most beautiful screen, the most explanatory one.

A test that works: show it to someone for two seconds, take it away, ask what the app does. If they cannot answer, the frame is not doing its job.

Frame two: why you

They understand the category now. Frame two answers why this one instead of the other twelve.

Look at what your competitors claim. If everyone in the category says the same three things, say the fourth.

Frame three: how easy

At this point interest is real, and the objection is effort.

Show how quickly someone gets to value. Concrete beats vague: "Set up in three steps" beats "Easy to use".

Frames four and beyond

Supporting material. Secondary features, variety of screens, social proof.

Do not move essential messages here. Very few people scroll this far, and you cannot fix a weak first frame with a strong fifth one.

Caption length

One sentence per frame. Two lines maximum.

At thumbnail size a long caption becomes texture rather than text. If it cannot be read in under a second, it will not be read at all.

Type size

Set caption height as a proportion of the image, not in absolute pixels, because the same asset renders at several sizes.

Around six percent of the image height is a reliable floor. On a 2868 pixel tall screenshot that is roughly 170 pixels.

Words to avoid

"Seamless", "intuitive", "powerful", "revolutionary". They are unverifiable and every competing app uses them, so they carry no information.

Replace them with something measurable. Not "powerful search" but "search 10,000 notes instantly".

Localisation changes the layout

Translated captions are not the same length. German and Turkish run roughly twenty to thirty percent longer than English; Japanese and Korean run shorter.

Design the caption area for your longest language or the layout breaks when you localise. This is one of the more common reasons localised listings look worse than the original.

Test the order before writing new frames

Reordering existing screenshots is the cheapest experiment in the store. Both platforms support running variants, and swapping frames one and two often moves conversion on its own.

Only when reordering stops helping is it worth producing new frames.

Making that cheap matters. buffmy.app Studio generates caption variants across every device size at once, so testing a new message is minutes rather than an afternoon.