Making iPad screenshots for an app built for iPhone

You designed every screen on a phone, captured a clean iPhone set, and App Store Connect still won't let you submit: it wants at least one screenshot for the 13-inch iPad. You never decided to ship an iPad app. Your project template decided for you. Here is how to check, what the choice commits you to, and how to compose an iPad set that doesn't look like a phone lost on a big white table.

Why App Store Connect is asking

Which devices an iOS app runs on comes from one build setting, TARGETED_DEVICE_FAMILY. A value of 1 means iPhone, 2 means iPad, and 1,2 means both. New Xcode projects and flutter create both start with iPad included, and nothing in day-to-day development reminds you it's there. Our own project file still says TARGETED_DEVICE_FAMILY = "1,2" on every build configuration, unchanged since the first commit.

To check yours, open the target's General tab in Xcode and look at Supported Destinations, or search the project file:

grep TARGETED_DEVICE_FAMILY ios/Runner.xcodeproj/project.pbxproj

Apple's screenshot specifications are plain about the consequence: if your app runs on iPad, you must provide at least one screenshot for the 13-inch iPad display. That's 2064×2752 or 2048×2732 in portrait, or the same pairs turned sideways for landscape. App Store Connect scales that set down for the 11-inch and older iPad sizes, so one set covers every iPad. Up to ten per size, PNG or JPEG, no transparency.

Decide before version 1, because it's one-way

The tempting fix is to untick iPad, rebuild, and move on. Before your first release, that works. After it, it usually doesn't. Apple's long-standing technical note on device support (QA1623) says App Store Connect will not accept an update that runs on fewer devices than the version already on sale, “by design”, because an update has to work for every customer who already has the app. The options it lists are to make the app work on the devices you originally claimed, to require a newer iOS version that leaves old devices behind, or to remove the app and publish a new one under a different bundle ID. Developer forum threads from people who shipped iPad by accident tell the same story: the upload is refused once the live version supports iPad.

So the real question for a phone-first app is not “how do I make iPad screenshots?” but “do I want to support iPad for the life of this app?”

Going iPhone-only doesn't hide you from iPad owners. Apple's guidelines (2.4.1) say iPhone apps should run on iPad whenever possible, and an iPhone-only app still installs there, running in an iPhone-sized window. You skip the iPad screenshot requirement and the iPad layout work. The cost is that iPad users get a small, letterboxed experience, and you can add iPad in a later update when you're ready. Adding devices is allowed; only removing them is blocked.

Keeping iPad means the iPad version is a product, not a side effect. App Review can run a universal build on an iPad, and a layout that clips, overlaps or stretches there is a rejection waiting to happen. If you keep it, look at every screen on the 13-inch simulator before you think about marketing art.

Capture the iPad app, not the phone app

Guideline 2.3.3 asks that screenshots show the app in use and not misrepresent its actual interface. For iPad, the honest source is a capture of your app running on an iPad. The 13-inch iPad Pro simulator produces 2064×2752 captures, exactly the size the store wants, with one command:

xcrun simctl io booted screenshot ipad-home.png

Dropping an iPhone capture into an iPad device frame is the shortcut to avoid. Apart from showing an interface iPad users won't see, it reads as wrong at a glance: the proportions of a phone screen don't fit inside a tablet bezel.

Compose for 3:4, not for a taller phone

The canvas shape is the whole design problem. An iPhone 6.9-inch screenshot is 1320×2868, roughly 1:2.17. The 13-inch iPad canvas is 2064×2752, exactly 3:4. If you scale a phone layout to fill the iPad's height, it ends up about 1,267 pixels wide on a 2,064-pixel canvas, with roughly 400 pixels of nothing on each side. That empty band is what makes lazy iPad sets look unfinished.

Working from the iPad capture instead changes what goes where:

Shrink the device, not the headline. An iPad screenshot already carries far more interface than a phone one, so the device can sit at 70–80% of the canvas width with the headline above it. Keep the headline at the same share of the canvas width as your iPhone set, not the same pixel size. Copied pixel-for-pixel from a 1320-wide design, a headline shrinks by more than a third relative to the iPad frame and stops reading at thumbnail size.

Lead with what the bigger screen adds. If your iPad layout has a sidebar, a two-column view, a larger canvas or a drag-and-drop between panes, that's frame one. A shopper on an iPad wants evidence the app was built for the device in their hand, and an enlarged single-column list doesn't give them any.

Pick portrait or landscape deliberately. Mixing orientations within one set makes the carousel jump between shapes. If your iPad app lives in landscape, a keyboard app, a canvas tool, a dashboard, show it in landscape. Our Info.plist allows all four iPad orientations, which is normal, but the screenshot set should still commit to one.

Keep the same visual system. Same backgrounds, same type, same headline order as the iPhone set, so the brand reads as one product across devices. Only the composition changes.

When the screenshots expose the layout

Sometimes you capture the iPad screens and the problem isn't the marketing art. Text runs 2,000 pixels wide, buttons stretch edge to edge, a card list has one card per row with a wide band of empty space beside it. That's the app telling you it was never laid out for iPad. Cap content width, add a second column where the data supports it, and only then capture. If that's more work than the iPad audience justifies right now, and your app isn't live yet, this is the moment to go iPhone-only and revisit it later.

Google Play has its own version of this. Tablet screenshots there sit in a separate, optional large-screen set beside the phone ones, so the same rule applies: capture the tablet layout and compose for its proportions rather than reusing phone art.

Export both sets from one design

ShotCanvas keeps one design and renders it at each store size, the 13-inch iPad included, so the headline order, colors and type match across devices. Turn on the iPad 13” target, drop in your iPad captures, and check the composition at 3:4 before you export.