The feature graphic is the 1024 x 500 banner at the top of your Google Play listing. It is mandatory for every app, and unlike screenshots there is no fallback — omit it and you cannot publish.
Where it actually appears
Understanding the placements explains most of the design rules:
- At the top of your store listing, full width.
- As the thumbnail when Play features your app in a curated collection.
- In some search and browse placements, at reduced size.
- As the preview image when someone shares your listing link.
- Behind the play button, if you have attached a promo video.
That last one matters and is regularly forgotten. If you add a video, a play button is overlaid in the centre of the graphic. Anything important there gets covered.
The hard constraints
- Exactly 1024 x 500 pixels. Not approximately. - JPEG or 24-bit PNG, no alpha channel. Transparency is rejected. - Under 15 MB, which is generous and rarely binding. - No device frames that misrepresent hardware, and no imagery implying Google endorsement. - No store badges — do not put a "Get it on Google Play" badge inside it.
Design for the smallest rendering
The graphic is authored at 1024 x 500 but frequently displayed far smaller. A useful discipline is to design it, then view it at roughly a quarter size. If the text is unreadable there, it is unreadable in half its real placements.
Concretely:
- Keep the app name under about 25 characters at a large weight.
- One line of supporting text at most, and only if it survives shrinking.
- Type no smaller than about 40 px at full size.
- High contrast between text and background. Mid-tone text on a mid-tone gradient is the single most common failure.
- Keep the centre clear for a possible video play button, and keep meaningful content out of the outer 5 percent, which can be cropped.
What to put in it
The graphic that works is usually the simplest one: your app icon or wordmark, the app name, and one short line saying what the app does, over a solid colour or a restrained gradient.
What reliably does not work:
- A screenshot shrunk to fit. UI designed for a phone is illegible at banner size.
- A collage of several screens. At thumbnail size it becomes visual noise.
- Long taglines. If it needs a comma, it is too long.
- Photographic backgrounds with busy detail competing against the text.
- Text repeating the app name, which already appears directly beneath the graphic in the listing.
Match it to your screenshots
The feature graphic and the first screenshot are seen together, roughly a second apart. When their colours and type do not match, the listing looks assembled from parts by different people. Pull the background colour and headline font from the same palette you used for the screenshot set — consistency here reads as competence, which is exactly the impression you want before anyone has tried the app.
Test it honestly
Before publishing, run three checks:
- Shrink it to 25 percent and confirm the name is still readable.
- Overlay a circle in the centre approximating a video play button, and confirm nothing important sits behind it.
- Put it beside two competitors' graphics from your category. If yours disappears between them, raise the contrast rather than adding more elements.
Play also supports store listing experiments on the feature graphic, so if the app has meaningful traffic it is worth testing two versions rather than settling it by opinion.