If you’ve already developed apps for Windows Phone 7, you should be familiar with the splash screen. It’s a static image that is immediately displayed when the app is opened and disappears when the app is fully loaded and ready to be used.
The splash screen was part of the standard Visual Studio template for Windows Phone 7 projects, but it has been removed in Windows Phone 8 projects.
Due to the performance improvements introduced in the Windows Runtime, apps now start much faster, so typically a splash screen is not needed.
If you do need a splash screen, you’ll have to manually add it to the project following a specific naming convention: it has to be in JPG format, the file name has to be SplashScreenImage.jpg, and the required resolution is 768 × 1280. This way, the image will be automatically adapted to the resolution of the device. If you want full control over the device’s resolution, you can add three different images, one for each supported resolution. In this case, the naming convention to follow is:
SplashScreenImage.screen-WVGA.jpg for 480 × 800 devices.
SplashScreenImage.screen-WXGA.jpg for 768 × 1280 devices.
SplashScreenImage.screen-720p.jpg for 720 × 1280 devices.
The 1080p resolution, from an aspect ratio point of view, behaves like 720p: if your application is launched on a 1080p device, the 720p splash screen will be used if one exists.
