9:41 and the status bar: what to show in App Store screenshots

Fix the clock, fill the signal and the battery, and strip everything that dates the capture. Here is the checklist, the reason behind 9:41, and the exact measurements if you are redrawing the bar instead of capturing it.

Published: 3 September 2026 · Last reviewed: 25 September 2026

A checklist before you press capture

Go through the top strip of the screen item by item. Each one either helps the set look like one product or quietly says “this was a capture taken on someone's desk”.

• Clock. Freeze it at one time for every image. The conventional value is 9:41.
• Cellular signal. Show all the bars. Few readers will remember it, but a drooping indicator pulls the eye for no benefit.
• Wi-Fi. Visible, at full strength, for the same reason.
• Battery. Full and idle. A charging bolt tells the viewer a cable was plugged in while you shot it.
• Carrier label. Remove it. It ties the image to a time and a country, and you may not sell in that country.
• Extras. Notification badges, alarms, location arrows and the red screen-recording pill all go. That last one announces exactly how the image was made.

Where 9:41 came from

It is a keynote habit. The demo phone shows the clock time at which the product is revealed on stage, so what the audience sees in the room matches the screen. Years of repetition turned it into the default look in app marketing.

The value itself is arbitrary. The thing that matters is that every image agrees. If six screenshots were taken at six moments of an afternoon, a scrolling viewer will not consciously clock the difference, yet the set starts to feel like loose captures rather than a single product.

Keeping the bar or dropping it

If the image is a straight capture, keep the real bar and simply tidy the clock and icons. That is the honest, zero-cost route.

If you place the screen inside a drawn device with a headline above it, consider no bar at all, because a strip chopped off by the frame looks accidental. Whichever way you go, apply it to the entire set: a set where some images have a bar and some do not is worse than either choice.

Redrawing the bar: the measurements

When you composite a screen instead of capturing one, you need the real geometry, which is laid out further in the status bar guide. The figures below were taken from a native 1179 px screenshot of a 393 × 852 pt screen rather than read off a design file.

Two numbers here get confused. 59 pt is the line where your own content may begin; 54 pt is the height of the bar itself, and the gap of 5 pt between them is padding added by the system. Hand-built mockups most often fail by starting content at 44 pt, which parks the clock on top of the first heading. If you remember one number, make it 59.

The rule above all the others

What the frame shows must be something the app really does. A tidy status bar is cosmetic and has never got anyone into trouble. A frame that shows a screen the build cannot produce is another matter: that is no longer styling a screenshot, it is advertising a different app.