Iphone App submission: Status bar and screenshots

Question

I have read somewhere that the screenshots you send to Apple should NOT contain the status bar; however my app shows the status bar during runtime. After having a look around the App store I have noticed quite a few app screenshots contain the status bar.

So my question is... Is including the status bar in application screenshots a "rejectable" offence? NB The Google App screenshots contains the status bar so I am guessing no...

Many thanks!

Answer 1

According to the iTunes Connect Developer Guide (PDF available once you're logged into your dev account):

iPhone and iPod touch:

Portrait: 320x460px min, 320x480px max
Landscape: 480x300px min, 480x320px max
"Please do not include the iPhone status bar."

iPad:

Portrait: 748x1024px min, 768x1024px max
Landscape: 1004x768px min, 1024x768px max
"Please do not include the iPad status bar."

Although as Noah has pointed out this is routinely ignored by developers and by Apple reviewers.
I've not had any apps rejected for showing the status bar in screenshots.

Answer 2

As near as I can tell, the only effect of not cropping out the status bar in the default image is that Xcode presents a small yellow warning label over the image thumbnail in the target's summary pane.

If this annoys you and you decide that you want to crop out the status bar, it's surprisingly hard to do this without distorting the colours. That's a disaster, since it introduces a visual discontinuity in the transition from the default image to your running code.

I'm not 100% sure, but I believe this is because the on-device screenshot produces an unusual PNG without any embedded color profile, while almost any tool you use to crop (like Preview) will insist on adding some color profile. Then your cropped PNG gets further modified by Xcode's optimisation when it builds the IPA bundle, so it's tricky.

The only solution I found was to do the crop using ImageMagick's utility "convert". For instance, to crop the 20px status bar from an iPad-1 landscape screenshot of 1024x768 to get a default image of 1024x748, you do:

convert infile.png -crop 1024x748+0+20 outfile.png

You can use "identify -verbose" on a file and see all the other changes most other image editing tools are making by default.