iPhone 18 and the foldable iPhone Ultra: what it means for your App Store screenshots

When the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Ultra are expected to launch

Apple has not announced a date. Based on the company's usual pattern — a Tuesday or Wednesday keynote in the first half of September, pre-orders that Friday, retail availability the Friday after — the two scenarios being discussed are a September 9 event with a September 18 release, or a September 15 event with a September 25 release. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has said the event falls in the first half of September, and the 9/11 anniversary sitting mid-week has led several trackers to lean towards the later slot.

One wrinkle worth planning around: the foldable may not ship on the same day as the iPhone 18 Pro. Reports suggest the iPhone Ultra could slip to an October release and may be limited to the United States at first. Apple is also splitting its iPhone calendar — the standard iPhone 18 (non-Pro) is expected in spring 2027 rather than alongside the Pro models, which means two separate screenshot-refresh moments in one product cycle instead of one.

iPhone 18 Pro: what is actually changing

For screenshot purposes, the iPhone 18 Pro is close to a non-event — and that is good news. The Pro is expected to keep the 6.3″ display and the Pro Max the 6.9″ display, the same sizes as the iPhone 17 Pro generation. Under-display Face ID reportedly is not ready, so the Dynamic Island survives, possibly narrower. The headline changes are internal: a 2nm A20 chip, Apple's second-generation C2 modem, a variable-aperture main camera, and a slightly thicker camera plateau.

Practically: if your listing already uses the 6.9″ App Store slot at 1320 × 2868 px, the iPhone 18 Pro Max does not force you to re-export anything. What changes is the mockup — a listing that shows last year's handset reads as stale to a shopper holding this year's. That is a marketing refresh, not a compliance one.

• Display sizes unchanged: 6.3″ Pro, 6.9″ Pro Max — existing 1320 × 2868 exports stay valid.
• Dynamic Island stays, possibly ~35% narrower — a visual detail in device frames, not a size change.
• Thicker camera plateau and a new deep-red colour are the visible design deltas.
• Prices are rumoured to rise $200–300, which raises the bar on how polished a listing needs to look.

iPhone Ultra: the foldable, by the numbers

The folding iPhone is the one that matters here. Supply-chain reporting has converged on a book-style fold: a roughly 7.8″ inner display opening out of a roughly 5.5″ cover display, with a crease reported at under 0.15 mm depth. The inner panel is described at 2,713 × 1,920 and the cover at 2,088 × 1,422 — an inner aspect ratio much closer to an iPad than to any iPhone.

The other spec that matters for design is biometrics: there is reportedly no room for Face ID, so the iPhone Ultra is expected to use a Touch ID power button, while iOS 27 code has been found referencing a device that combines a Dynamic Island with Touch ID. Every screenshot you draw of this device therefore needs a different front-face story than any current iPhone.

Why a folding iPhone breaks the screenshot model

Every App Store screenshot slot today is a fixed pixel rectangle tied to a device class. You design one 1320 × 2868 image, Apple scales it down for older iPhones, done. A foldable has two screens with two different aspect ratios and a live transition between them — and at WWDC 2026 Apple told developers to stop designing around fixed screen assumptions and make interfaces resize fluidly. iOS 27 reportedly carries internal "foldState" and "angleDegrees" values so apps can react to how open the device is.

That guidance is about your app's UI. But your store listing is the first screen a buyer sees, and it has the same problem one level up: a screenshot that shows a tall narrow phone UI tells a foldable owner nothing about what your app does with 7.8 inches. Conversely, a screenshot that only shows the expansive unfolded layout misrepresents the app for the majority of buyers on a normal iPhone.

What App Store screenshots for a foldable could look like

Apple has published nothing about a foldable screenshot slot, so what follows is reasoning from precedent rather than fact. There are three plausible outcomes, and they are worth designing against now because the work is nearly identical in each case.

The most likely, based on how Apple handled the 6.9″ transition, is that the iPhone Ultra initially inherits scaled 6.9″ screenshots and a dedicated slot appears only once the device has meaningful install base. The second possibility is a new display class in App Store Connect at the inner panel's native resolution. The third — and the one that would actually serve shoppers best — is a slot that expects the unfolded canvas, with a separate optional cover-screen size.

How to design a screenshot that survives a fold

Whichever slot Apple ships, the design constraints are already predictable, and they are the same constraints Android developers learned on the Galaxy Z Fold. Composition has to tolerate a change of aspect ratio without the message falling apart.

The single most useful habit is to design the message and the device frame as separable layers. A headline anchored to the top of the canvas and a device mockup anchored to the bottom will re-flow into a wider frame; a full-bleed illustration where text is baked into the artwork will not.

• Keep headlines in the top third and short enough to survive a 30–40% width change without rewrapping.
• Show the fold. A frame where the device is open, with content spanning both halves, communicates "this app uses your big screen" faster than any caption.
• Use at least one frame showing the cover screen, so buyers understand the app works closed too.
• Avoid putting anything critical along the vertical centre line of an unfolded mockup — the crease reads visually even when it is 0.15 mm deep.
• Design the carousel story so it still makes sense if a frame is cropped: the first frame must carry the value proposition alone.
• Do not bake device chrome into your captured screen image. Capture the raw UI and add the frame separately, so the same capture can be re-framed for a different body.

What is confirmed and what is not

To be clear about the epistemics, since a lot of foldable coverage blurs this line: nothing in the iPhone Ultra section above is confirmed by Apple. Display sizes, the Touch ID power button, the price band and the release window are supply-chain reporting and code archaeology. The iOS 27 "foldState" strings and Apple's WWDC 2026 adaptive-layout guidance are the strongest signals, because they are things Apple itself shipped.

The safe planning position is therefore: treat the iPhone 18 Pro refresh as certain and near-zero-effort, treat a foldable screenshot slot as a maybe that costs you one extra design pass, and build both from source files you can re-export rather than from flattened images you would have to redraw.

Where Ecranify already fits

For the iPhone 18 Pro family, nothing about your workflow changes. Because the Pro and Pro Max keep the 6.3″ and 6.9″ display sizes, the App Store export presets you use today — 1320 × 2868 for the mandatory 6.9″ slot — stay valid, and Ecranify's existing iPhone Pro Max mockups work out of the box the day the phone ships. Swap in a fresh screen capture, re-export, done.

The foldable is the more interesting case, and it is exactly the case a parametric tool is built for. Devices in Ecranify are not fixed 3D models — every mockup is generated from parameters: body width, height and depth, corner radius, edge bevel, front-face inset, plus positioned features like the camera lens, display cutout, Dynamic Island, buttons, speaker grills and custom decals. Building a new device means changing numbers, not modelling a mesh.

So on the day the iPhone Ultra's real dimensions are known, recreating it is an afternoon of slider work rather than a wait for someone else to publish a template: set the unfolded body dimensions, dial in the thin 4.5 mm profile, place the hole-punch cutout, move Face ID off and Touch ID onto the power button, and export at whatever size App Store Connect ends up asking for. Whatever shape Apple's first folding iPhone turns out to be, the tool does not need to ship an update before you can mock it up.

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