Screenshot style breakdown
Sampled from 5 of Swim Guide's App Store screenshots — background, accent and theme, measured by LaunchShots (not something Apple publishes).
#FCFCFC bg
#DDDDDD
#1C446C accent
#111111 text
Reading the caption text from the screenshots in your browser…
Screenshots
iPad screenshots
Icon palette
About this app
** As seen on USA Today, CBC, CBC Radio, Radio Canada, Huffington Post, LA Times, Water Canada, ABC News, Men's Journal, National Post, and Mashable. ** Swim Guide is a website and smartphone app for iPhone®. Swim Guide delivers free up-to-date water quality information for over 8,000 beaches, lakes, rivers, and swimming holes in Canada, the U.S., Mexico, the Bahamas, Australia and New Zealand. Swim Guide provides you with current recreational water quality information for your favourite beaches and swimming holes. Every beach is marked with a Green or Red icon so you know when the water at your favourite beach is clean for swimming and when the water quality is failed to recreational water quality criteria. As of 2019, Swim Guide is the most popular beach information service in the world, with over 4-million all time users. Finding a beach with clean, swimmable water for you and …
App details
What you can learn from Swim Guide
Every shipping app on the App Store has gone through the same decisions you're working through right now: which screenshot goes first, what caption sits over it, which device frame to show, what color the background should be. The 10 screenshots above are Swim Guide's answers to those questions — they're public, they're real, and they made it through Apple's review.
What the numbers say: Swim Guide runs a light set where the background shifts from screenshot to screenshot (first shot #FCFCFC) — each image has to stand on its own, so the captions carry more of the story. The accent colour we picked up, #1C446C, is the one to reuse for badges, arrows and highlighted words if you borrow this look. Hit Use this style to open the editor with these exact colours and drop your own screenshot in.
Notice the first screenshot in particular. It's the one users see in search results and on the product page, and it's where most apps spend their best caption and tightest design. Look at the proportion of background to phone, where the text sits, what one thing the image is trying to communicate.
Want to see how other Reference apps approach the same problem? Browse more Reference apps in the showcase.
Take what works into your own screenshots
Open LaunchShots and design your App Store & Google Play screenshots — pick a device frame, drop captions, ship in minutes. Free, in your browser.
Open the screenshot editor →Apps with a similar look
Closest background + accent colours among the listings we've analysed — useful when you want to see the same palette handled by a different team.