Create a Splash Screen

Learn how to create a splash screen for the app and best practices.

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A splash screen, also known as a launch screen, is the first screen that a user sees when opening your app, and it stays visible while the app is loading. You can control when the splash screen disappears by using the native SplashScreen API.

Customize the splash screen for your app

The default splash screen is a blank white screen, this can be customized using the splash key in the project's Expo config (app.json, app.config.js).

Video walkthrough

Create an app icon and splash image with the Figma template and video below:

Make a splash image

The iOS Human Interface Guidelines list the devices screen sizes. I'll go with 1242 pixels wide (width of the widest iPhone at the moment of writing) and 2436 pixels tall (height of the tallest iPhone at the moment of writing). Expo will resize the image for you depending on the size of the device, and we can specify the strategy used to resize the image with splash.resizeMode.

Android screen sizes vary greatly with the massive variety of devices on the market. One strategy to deal with this is to look at the most common resolutions and design around that - you can see a list of devices and their resolutions here. Given that we can resize and crop our splash image automatically, it looks like we can stick with our dimensions, as long as we don't depend on the splash image fitting the screen exactly. This is convenient because we can use one splash image for both iOS and Android - less for you to read in this guide and less work for you to do.

You can work off of this Sketch template if you like. I did, and I changed the background color to a faint yellow and put a Noodle emoji in the middle. It's worth noting that the splash image supports transparency, although we didn't use it here.

Export the image as a PNG and put it in your project directory. I'll assume it's in the assets directory and named splash.png.

warning: Currently only PNG images are supported. If you use another image format, making a production build of your app will fail.

splash.image

Open the Expo config (app.json, app.config.js) and add the following:

{
  "expo": {
+    "splash": {
+      "image": "./assets/splash.png"
+    }
  }
}

Now re-open the Expo Go app and launch your project, you should see your new splash screen. There may be a delay before it shows up in Expo Go, this won't happen in custom builds, see: "Differences between environments" below.

It's required to close and re-open the Expo Go app on iOS in order to see changes to the splash screen in the Expo config. This is a known issue that we are working to resolve. On Android, you need to press the refresh button from the notification drawer.

splash.backgroundColor

If you set a background color other than white for your splash image, you may see white border around it. This is due to the splash.resizeMode property and the default background color, which is #ffffff (white). Let's resolve this by setting the splash.backgroundColor to be the same as our splash image background color.

{
  "expo": {
    "splash": {
      "image": "./assets/splash.png",
+      "backgroundColor": "#FEF9B0"
    }
  }
}

splash.resizeMode

Any splash image that you provide will be resized to maintain its aspect ratio and to fit the resolution of the user's device. There are two strategies that can be used for resizing: contain (default) and cover. In both cases, the splash image is within the splash screen. These work the same as the React Native Image component's resizeMode, as demonstrated in the following diagram.

Applying this to our noodles example, let's remove the backgroundColor and try it out:

{
  "expo": {
    "splash": {
      "image": "./assets/splash.png",
+      "resizeMode": "cover"
    }
  }
}

Notice that in the last example, we stretched the image to fill the entire width, while maintaining the aspect ratio, and so the noodles emoji ended up being larger than it was when resizeMode was set to contain. If you are still unclear about the difference between contain and cover, this blog post describes precisely what they mean.

Customizing the configuration for iOS and Android

Any of the splash options can be configured on a per-platform basis by nesting the configuration under the android or ios keys within app.json (the same as how you would customize an icon for either platform). In addition to this, certain configuration options are only available on iOS or Android.

• On iOS, you can set ios.splash.tabletImage if you would like to have a different splash image on iPads.
• On Android, you can set splash images for different device DPIs, from mdpi to xxxhdpi.

Using SplashScreen when caching assets

We recommend displaying a SplashScreen when pre-loading and caching assets or fetching any data from AsyncStorage to set the app up using expo-splash-screen package. You can also use this package to control the moment of splash screen visibility changes.

Differences between environments - iOS

Your app can be opened from the Expo Go app or in a standalone app, and it can be either published or in development. There are slight differences in the splash screen behavior between these environments.

• On the left, we are in the Expo Go app and loading an app that is currently in development. Notice that on the bottom of the splash screen you see an information bar that shows information relevant to preparing the JavaScript and downloading it to the device. We see an orange screen before the splash image appears, because the background color is set immediately but the image needs to be downloaded.
• In the middle, we are in the Expo Go app and we are loading a published app. Notice that again the splash image does not appear immediately.
• On the right, we are in a standalone app. Notice that the splash image appears immediately.

Splash screen API limitations on Android

Splash screen behaves in most cases exactly the same as in iOS case.

There is a slight difference when it comes down to standalone Android applications. In this scenario extra attention should be paid to android.splash section configuration inside app.json.

Depending on the resizeMode you will get the following behavior:

• contain - on Android, the splash screen API is unable to stretch/scale the splash image (see the native mode). As a result, the contain mode will initially display only the background color, and when the initial view hierarchy is mounted then splash.image will be displayed.
• cover - this mode has the limitations as contain for the same reasons.
• native - in this mode your app will be leveraging Android's ability to present a static bitmap while the application is starting up. Android (unlike iOS) does not support stretching the provided image, so the application will present the given image centered on the screen. By default splash.image would be used as the xxxdpi resource. It's up to you to provide graphics that meet your expectations and fit the screen dimension. To achieve this, use different resolutions for different device DPIs, from mdpi to xxxhdpi.

Bare workflow apps

If your app does not use Expo Prebuild (formerly the managed workflow) to generate the native ios and android directories, then changes in the Expo config will have no effect. To setup and customize your splash screen manually, refer to this guide.

iOS Caching

In custom iOS builds, launch screens can sometimes remain cached between builds, making it harder to test new images. Apple recommends clearing the derived data folder before rebuilding, this can be done with Expo CLI by running:

Refer to Apple's guide for more on testing launch screens.