I captured screenshot data from the top 200 iOS and Android apps and this is what I found
Designing screenshots for your app can feel like shooting in the dark; you never know what’s going to hit and you’re surprised when you do. At LaunchMatic, we design iOS and Android app screenshots full-time, so it’s our duty to take the guessing out of it.
I manually went through the top 200 apps on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, searching for clues that could help us build a framework for designing better screenshots. That framework has yet to be finalized… but I did find some interesting data that might assist your next design iteration.
Games and Apps are shown together within the top 200 so I separated my findings between both.
Data on Apps
We looked at data secured from an app’s first 3 screenshots.
Text Captions
- 94% of iOS Apps have text captions
- Average length of a single text caption is 6 words, or 35 characters
- Apps with over 10 words per text caption typically have a focus “keyword” with subtext below
App Preview
- Only 23% of iOS apps have an app preview video
Text Captions
- 90% of Android Apps have text captions
- Average length of a single text caption is 5.9 words, or 35 characters
- Apps with over 10 words per text caption typically have a focus “keyword” with subtext below
App Preview
- 29% of Android apps have an app preview video
Data on Games
We looked at data secured from an app’s first 3 screenshots.
Text Captions
- Only 47% of iOS Games have text captions
- Average length of a single text caption is 3.7 words, or 23 characters
App Preview
- 77% of iOS games have an app preview video
Text Captions
- Only 41% of Android Games have text captions
- Average length of a single text caption is 3.2 words, or 20 characters
App Preview
- 51% of Android games have an app preview video
Summary & fun facts
- Keep your captions short and sweet, while also making sure they are legible from Apple Search results (large and bold)
- Caption length between iOS and Android are almost identical (also b/c we are dealing with many of the same apps)
- Of the iOS top 200, 119 are apps and 81 are games
- Of the Android top 200, 96 are apps and 104 are games
Grab the Google Sheet to parse the data yourself.
