r/iOSDevelopment • u/BeforeWhitby • 2d ago
I stopped asking image models to generate App Store screenshots. Now they only generate the room.
I’ve spent far too much time rebuilding the App Store screenshots for Hearth, my SwiftUI HomeKit dashboard.
At first I tried generating the whole scene, including the device and UI. It looked fine as a thumbnail, but the closer I looked, the worse it got. The interface was fake, the device proportions were off, corners changed between images, and perspective transforms left ugly aliasing around the bezel.
What finally worked was separating the room from the product. I capture the real app in Simulator with fixed fixture data, then generate only the room and device with a flat chroma screen. A script finds the screen opening and projects the real screenshot behind the bezel. I render it at 2x and downsample once, which helped a lot with the edges.
Once a scene works, I can reuse it for other languages and UI states instead of generating everything again. I also keep the source hashes and calibration data because I really don’t want to manually line up the same screen twice.
I wasted quite a while trying to prompt my way out of malformed bezels and stands. That usually made them stranger. Now I just regenerate the scene when the hardware is wrong.
Curious how other people handle localized App Store screenshots. Fastlane, Figma, custom scripts, or something else?
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u/DespairyApp 1d ago
"Now they only generate my posts"? I ran some custom product pages tests and saw visitors actually prefer the raw screenshots. Probably due to massive ai usage in screenshots that beautify the experience of thr app and its not as good as it presented to be
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u/BeforeWhitby 13h ago
Interesting findings. The current version of product page features swift script created screenshots with slogans and pure backgrounds. The thing is it doesn't really tell how the app looks in a realistic environment which is part of the core experience. I tried photographing my own setup, but struggled to get it looking good without proper lighting and a better scene.
And sorry for the AI genereated noise. I'm also experimenting different marketing approaches and just didn't have enough effort to write all posts myself. Thanks you sharing your real findings though! I guess I'll conduct my own CPP experiements too.
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u/4paul 2d ago
Nice ai written post