Google Play feature graphics: what works at 1024 × 500

Every Play listing has one, because you cannot publish without it. Almost nobody designs it.

It is 1024 × 500, it sits above your screenshots, and Google uses it anywhere it promotes your app — collections, editorial placements, search surfaces. It is the only asset in your listing that can get you featured, and the median example is a phone screenshot stretched to fit.

The spec, briefly

• 1024 × 500 pixels, exactly. No range, unlike Play screenshots.
• PNG or 24-bit JPEG, no alpha channel.
• Required to publish.

Full dimensions for everything else are on the Google Play sizes page.

Design for a crop you cannot see

This is the constraint that catches everyone. Google renders this image at different ratios across its surfaces, and superimposes a play button over the centre when your listing has a promo video.

So: keep the subject and any text well inside the middle band, assume the outer edges may be cropped away, and assume something may land on top of the centre. A composition that depends on a corner is a composition that will break somewhere you never look.

What the good ones do

They make one promise in three or four words, with one supporting image, legible at a glance. That is the entire brief.

The pattern that reliably works:

1. Four words maximum, set large, in the left or centre third.
2. One visual anchor — a single product element, illustration or device, not a collage.
3. A background that is doing something, but not competing. Flat colour and simple gradients both work; a busy photograph does not.
4. Type and palette lifted from your screenshots, so the banner and the panels underneath read as one listing.

That last point is the one most often missed. A perfectly decent banner in a different palette from the screenshots below it makes the listing look like two pieces of work by two people.

The four ways it goes wrong

A stretched screenshot. A phone screenshot is roughly 1:2 portrait; this slot is 2:1 landscape. That is a factor of four, so it always looks squashed, letterboxed or arbitrarily cropped. This is the most common failure by a wide margin.

A logo on a flat colour. It says your name, which appears directly underneath it in the listing, twice. It says nothing about what the app does.

Six features in six columns. Unreadable at the size this is actually displayed, and it contradicts the one-promise rule that makes the format work.

The app name in the default font. The same information as the logo version, with less effort.

Category patterns worth borrowing

Looking across categories, a few shapes recur because they work:

• Games lead with a character or a scene and let the artwork carry it — usually with very little text, because the art is the pitch.
• Productivity and finance do better with a plain benefit statement and a restrained visual: this is a category where looking calm and trustworthy converts better than looking exciting.
• Health and fitness tend to use one human moment plus a short outcome line, which works because the outcome is emotional rather than functional.
• Utilities should state the job in the fewest possible words. Nobody is browsing a file manager for inspiration.

The common thread is not style, it is restraint. Every example that fails is trying to say more than one thing.

Build it beside the screenshots, not separately

The practical reason to make this in the same place as your Play screenshots is consistency: the feature graphic is an artboard in the same document, so it inherits the same palette and typography by default rather than by someone remembering to match it.

You can build one here at exactly 1024 × 500, previewed in a Play Store view before export. We do not upload to the Play Console for you — that part is still manual.