I’ve been rebuilding the App Store screenshots for Hearth, my SwiftUI HomeKit dashboard.



The first attempts looked convincing from a distance, but fell apart quickly: fake UI, incorrect device proportions, melted bezels, inconsistent corners, and heavy aliasing after perspective transforms.



The workflow that finally held up:



• Capture the real app from Simulator using deterministic fixture data

• Generate the physical room and device once, with a flat chroma display

• Detect the complete screen opening instead of manually placing four corners

• Perspective-project the real screenshot behind the physical bezel

• Render at 2× and downsample once to keep the edges clean

• Reuse the accepted scene for different languages and UI states

• Record source hashes and calibration data so the result is reproducible



The biggest lesson was that generative tools are useful for the environment, but shouldn’t be trusted with the product surface. The UI, geometry, typography, and localization all need to remain deterministic.



I also stopped trying to repair malformed hardware through more prompting. If the generated bezel or stand is wrong, regenerating the scene is faster than accumulating increasingly strange corrections.



How are you producing localized App Store screenshots—Fastlane, Figma, custom tooling, or something else?

I stopped asking image models to generate App Store screenshots. Now they only generate the room.