Best Fonts for App Store Screenshots (and How to Size Them)

Quick answer: The best fonts for App Store screenshots are bold or semibold sans serifs with a tall x-height and open letterforms, such as SF Pro, Inter, Manrope, Plus Jakarta Sans or Poppins. Set headlines at roughly 120–150 px on a 1320 px wide canvas so they stay readable in search results, use one font family with two weights, and check that it covers every language you ship.

Your screenshot font has one job: be readable when the image is shrunk to a thumbnail. In App Store search results, portrait screenshots appear three across, so each one is only about a third of the phone's width. Most people decide whether to tap from that view, which means fine detail disappears and only strong letterforms survive.

Look for these traits when you pick a font:

• Tall x-height. Lowercase letters that are large relative to capitals stay legible when scaled down.
• Open apertures. Letters like a, e, c and s should have wide openings so they don't close up into blobs.
• Sturdy weights. You need at least a bold (700) and ideally an extra bold or black (800–900) for headlines.
• Clear character shapes. Capital I, lowercase l and the digit 1 should be distinguishable, which matters for numbers like "10K" or "1-tap".
• Language coverage. If you localize, the font must include the accented Latin, Cyrillic, Greek or other scripts you need.

Thin, script and heavily decorative fonts usually fail the thumbnail test; they can work as a short accent word, never as the whole headline. Condensed display fonts are the exception only when the words are few, bold and large.

All of the fonts below except SF Pro are free on Google Fonts, so you can also use them on Google Play and your website.

If your app already uses a distinctive brand font, use it in the screenshots too. Consistency between the icon, the screenshots and the UI you show makes the listing feel like one product, as long as the font passes the thumbnail test.

Apple's Human Interface Guidelines list 11 points as the minimum text size on iOS. You can use that as a target for what a shopper actually sees, then work backward to pixels on your canvas.

A 6.3-inch iPhone screenshot is 1206 px wide, and in search results it's shown at about a third of the screen, roughly 115–120 points wide. That's a scale of about 0.1, so a headline set at 120 px on the canvas appears at around 11–12 points in search. Anything much smaller is decoration, not a message.

Use these sizes as a starting point on a 1320 × 2868 (6.9-inch) canvas and scale proportionally for other sizes:

Two practical rules follow from this math:

1. Keep headlines to 3–6 words on two lines. At 120 px, a 1320 px canvas fits roughly 15–18 characters per line, depending on the font's width.
2. Put the message in the headline, not the subtitle. Treat the subtitle as a bonus for people who open your product page. Our guide to App Store screenshot captions has headline formulas that fit these limits.

SF Pro is the system font for Apple platforms, and using it makes your captions feel at home on the App Store. Apple offers it as a download on its fonts page, together with SF Compact (the watchOS system font), SF Mono, New York and script extensions such as SF Arabic and SF Hebrew.

The catch is the license. Apple's font license limits how the SF fonts may be used, broadly to designing user interface mockups for apps on Apple platforms. Read the license that comes with the download before you put SF Pro in marketing graphics, and avoid it for Google Play screenshots, your website or ads. If you need one font for every channel, Inter is the closest widely used free alternative.

Note that the font inside your app's UI is a separate question. Text that appears in the captured screen is part of your app, whatever font it uses.

Once you've picked a family, a few typographic settings make a big difference at small sizes:

• One family, two weights. A heavy weight for headlines and a regular or medium weight for subtitles is enough. Mixing three fonts makes a set look improvised.
• Sentence case beats ALL CAPS. Capitals are harder to scan in longer lines. Keep all-caps for short eyebrow labels or condensed display fonts like Anton.
• Tighten line height. Headlines read best with line height around 1.0–1.15. Default paragraph spacing leaves awkward gaps between two short lines.
• Slightly tighten tracking on huge text. Very large bold type often looks loose; a small negative letter-spacing helps. Do the opposite for small caps labels.
• Highlight one word, not five. A single word in your brand color, such as "Sleep better tonight", guides the eye. Coloring half the headline cancels the effect.
• Watch contrast. Thin type on a busy gradient fails even at a large size. Pair your font choice with the advice in choosing colors for App Store screenshots.

Before you commit, view the whole set at thumbnail size next to two or three competing apps. If you can't read your headline in one second, the font, weight or size needs to change. For the rest of the design process, from capturing clean screens to exporting every size, see how to make App Store screenshots.

A font that looks great in English can break in other languages. Check these before you export a localized set:

If your brand font lacks a script, don't let the system silently fall back to a random font. Choose a deliberate companion, such as the matching Noto family, and use it for that language only. The full process, from text expansion to right-to-left layouts, is covered in how to localize App Store screenshots.