The upload rules that reject a screenshot before a human sees it

Right dimensions, wrong file. Alpha channels, colour spaces and formats fail an upload silently, and none of them are visible when you look at the image.

Published: 31 August 2026

Three failures you cannot see

A screenshot can be the right size, look correct in every viewer you own, and still be refused. The reasons are all in the file rather than in the picture, which is exactly why they waste so much time.

1. The alpha channel

Apple's rule is short: images cannot include alpha channels or transparencies. The trap is that a PNG carries an alpha channel whenever the export settings say so, whether or not a single pixel is actually transparent. Flatten onto an opaque background at export, or export as JPEG, and the problem disappears.

This is the single most common technical rejection, and it is invisible: the image looks identical with and without the channel.

2. The colour space

Work in RGB. A file that has been through a print-oriented pipeline can come back as CMYK, and CMYK is not an image the store will take. If your screenshots pass through a designer's workflow rather than straight out of a render, this is worth checking once — it will either never happen or happen every time.

3. The format

JPEG or PNG. Nothing else — not HEIC, which is what an iPhone produces by default in some configurations, and not WebP, which is what an export pipeline tuned for the web will happily hand you.

Count, and what happens if you skip a set

You can upload one to ten screenshots per set. The 6.9-inch set is the one that matters: every other display class falls back to a scaled version of it, and the 6.5-inch set is required only if you have not provided 6.9.

Which means the honest minimum is one set, at one of the 6.9-inch sizes — 1320 × 2868, 1290 × 2796 or 1260 × 2736. Everything else is you choosing to control how it looks on smaller phones rather than letting the scaler decide.

Landscape

Landscape is the same numbers the other way round: 2868 × 1320 and so on. It is worth uploading only if your app is genuinely used that way. A portrait app with landscape screenshots reads as a listing assembled from whatever was lying around.

A checklist that fits on one line each

• PNG or JPEG, never HEIC or WebP.
• RGB, never CMYK.
• No alpha channel, even an unused one.
• One of the accepted pixel sizes for the class, exactly — not close.
• One to ten per set; the 6.9-inch set first.
• Nothing in the frame that is not in the app.

The last line is the only one a machine will not catch for you, and it is the one that gets a listing pulled rather than merely rejected.

Source

Formats, alpha rule, counts and accepted sizes are from Apple's Screenshot specifications page in the App Store Connect help, read on 31 August 2026.