I love building apps. Designing App Store screenshots not that much 😅

Most developers don’t have a designer eye, and that’s completely okay. I’ve seen this in many devs that I had the chance to work with in the past. I also suffer from that a little bit.

Personally I enjoy building products, thinking about architecture, performance, testing, automations, user flows, design patterns... and what not. But design has never been my best strength. I’m probably a more technical type of dev.

When the time comes to create App Store or Play Store screenshots, this gap shows quickly, and makes me waste so much time. My problem is not effort or care, I can tell you that. It is rather a mix of a lack of design skills, experience working on design, and some guidance.

I recently found myself actively thinking about how to solve / shortcut this problem more often. So unsurprisingly, I decided to build a brand new product 🙈

I felt that gap is precisely where a drag and drop editor with bootstrapping features would start to make sense. It is much easier when you have a quick way to kick off your screenshots and start from a much more polished / professional point.

This product started as something I created for myself. I added an online screenshot editor with support for several screen ratios and form factors (including weareables), and I used it to create some templates. then I added those as an entry point to the platform, so whenever I needed screenshots for a new app I would just grab one of the templates and start iterating from there.

After that, I added support for AI powered generation, so you could grab your in-app screenshots and generate a fully working project in the editor using some predefined layouts (text above and mockup device below, text below with mockup device above, etc). That gave me speed without losing any control, since I could iterate on them after generation.

The product evolved so fast. I kept adding more templates and features, which allowed me to create even better / more professional templates later on. I also added automatic internationalization to the project.

At this point it just made sense to open it to the public. I gave templates a price, added subscriptions, and added some FREE templates so users could try the product for free and decide later if they wanted to pay for access to all templates and more powerful features.

I wasn’t trying to design something beautiful or perfect from scratch, but rather something functional and helpful. I was playing, having fun while building, and just working on features that help me avoid my most common mistakes.

Turns out creating this platform made a significant difference for me. Screenshots became way quicker and more consistent / better looking. Updates were easier too, streamlined. I could iterate without second guessing every decision, and without much trial and error anymore.

Anyway, the platform already made its first 100 users 🥳 which I am very proud of. And this is just the beginning!

If you want to try it, you can find it in ScreenshotWhale.com and pick one of the FREE templates to start. Let me know what you think!

P.S: Sometimes you don’t need to become good at something, just have the right tools!