Sampled from 6 of Gutenberg Project's App Store screenshots — background, accent and theme, measured by LaunchShots (not something Apple publishes).
#141414 bg
#343434
#740404 accent
#FFFFFF text
【Premier Reader】: This app costs $6, and our users are paying for it each and every day. Why? It is the best Gutenberg Reader: beautiful images, elegant formatting, and graceful page turning. Contents live from Project Gutenberg with last-minute update, more than 60,000 most important books ever published in history. Plus more than 7,000 human-read audio books. 【Audio books】: There are more than 7,000 human-read audio books, all for the price of a cup of coffee. Alternatively you could pay $3-5 for a single audiobook as some of the "Audio app" would ask you to pay. 【Book recommendation】: Every app gives you a list of book recommendation, but where did they find the list? dreamed up in 'lala' land? We base our recommendation solidly on big data, tens of millions of pages actually read by our users. Downloading or page flipping has no effect on the ranking of our recommendation …
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 12 screenshots above are Gutenberg Project's answers to those questions — they're public, they're real, and they made it through Apple's review.
What the numbers say: Gutenberg Project runs a mixed light-and-dark set where the background shifts from screenshot to screenshot (first shot #141414) — each image has to stand on its own, so the captions carry more of the story. The accent colour we picked up, #740404, 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 Book apps approach the same problem? Browse more Book apps in the showcase.
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 →Closest background + accent colours among the listings we've analysed — useful when you want to see the same palette handled by a different team.