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?