— App Store, Xcode, iOS, Screenshot Requirements, ImageMagick — 1 min read
Navigating the App Store's screenshot requirements can be kind of annoying sometimes, especially with recent Xcode versions lacking default support for the iPhone 8 Plus simulator and the device's inability to run iOS 17. If your app targets iOS 17 and above, this leads you to look for hacks and workarounds (why is the 5.5-inch screenshot even a requirement anymore for apps that only support iOS 17 and above? It makes no sense).
As mentioned above, by default, you don't have access to an iPhone 8 Plus emulator in recent versions of Xcode. You can download the simulator from the Organizer, but it only supports up to iOS 16.4... To make things even more frustrating, the iPhone SE 3rd Generation screen size isn't a direct replacement.
After a bit of searching, I found out that you can take your screenshots with an iPhone SE 3rd Generation and then resize them to meet the requirements. I also read that if you took the screenshots with an SE 3rd Generation and then opened them on an iPhone 8 Plus and took a screenshot again, that would also work - though that process seemed kind of tedious. You can find some other ideas in the Apple forum thread here. You'll be happy to know you aren't the only one running into the issue.
For those opting for the iPhone SE 3rd Generation simulator method, resizing screenshots can be streamlined using command-line tools like ImageMagick:
1convert [input_image] -resize 1242x2209 -crop 1242x2208+0+0 [output_image]Replace [input_image] with your screenshot's path and [output_image] with the desired filename.
Now all you need to do is upload them to App Store Connect. If you're not using Fastlane, I recommend trying it out; it definitely speeds things up!