A Shopify app listing takes one feature image and up to six desktop screenshots. Almost every developer treats them as seven images of the same kind. They are not.
The screenshots live on the listing page, which a merchant reaches only after deciding to click. The feature image goes everywhere else: search results, category pages, collections, the card in a recommendation strip. It is the only image most people who encounter your app will ever see.
Same size, different job
Both are 1600 × 900. That shared size is why they get treated the same, and it is a trap. The screenshot is read by somebody who has already arrived and wants detail. The feature image is read by somebody scrolling past who has given you about a second.
Detail is the wrong content for a second. At the size a feature image appears in a category grid, a screenshot of a settings panel is grey texture. It carries no information at all.
What a feature image has to do
One thing, and it is not show the app
. It is: make somebody who was not looking for you understand what you do, before they scroll past.
In practice that means a short line of type large enough to read at thumbnail size, and one picture that shows the outcome rather than the mechanism. Not a dashboard. Not a feature tour. Not your logo on a gradient, which requirement 4.4.4 refuses outright — an image that contains nothing but the app logo is not permitted.
The test
Shrink your feature image to about 300 pixels wide and look at it on a phone. If you cannot tell what the app does, neither can a merchant, and every impression you get in a category page is wasted.
Most feature images fail this. They fail it because they were designed at full size on a large monitor by somebody who already knows what the app does.
Where the screenshots earn their place
Once somebody has clicked, they want detail, and the five screenshots should give it: one capability each, on a real screen. Requirement 4.4.5 requires that they differ — each image in your app listing must be unique
— so the constraint and the good practice happen to agree.
The last one is worth reserving for the objection. Setup time, theme compatibility, whether it slows the storefront down. Whatever the thing is that people ask before installing, answer it in an image rather than in paragraph nine of the description.
A small practical note
Feature media may also be a video of two to three minutes. If you upload one, the still frame that shows before it plays is doing the feature image's job, and it deserves the same scrutiny.
The full table of sizes, formats and how many of each a listing takes is on our Shopify App Store image sizes page, and the three requirements an image is refused under are on the listing image rules page.