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App Store Screenshots with imperfect status bars have always annoyed me. How people can upload images intended to showcase their app that show two bars of signal and 4% battery remaining is beyond me. 😀

I felt so strongly about this that in 2012 I created an app to help people solve the problem. It drew a perfect status bar over the top of your screenshots which worked well until iOS 7 made the default status bar transparent. 😬 Luckily, Greg Spiers (who worked for me at the time) found UIStatusBarServer and we hacked around with it to create the same effect (full battery, time set to "9:41", etc…) for the simulator. No image processing or fake rendering needed! It's a much, much better way to achieve the same result. I removed Status Magic from sale and SimulatorStatusMagic was born. This project has been super successful over the years and I feel that between the original app, and this library, I've been involved in creating many perfect screenshots in the App Store. I really like that… 👍

Then, last night I learned that Apple had shipped simctl status_bar in beta 4 of Xcode 11! This new tool allows full control of the status bar in the simulator, just like SimulatorStatusMagic does. 🎉🎉🎉

But as I mentioned last week, it's a good thing when an open source project is sherlocked by Apple. SimulatorStatusMagic will go away, and everyone can still have perfect status bars. Either on real devices with QuickTime, or using simctl for the simulator.

I'll end my comment on this with something that made me laugh. When I learned about the new simctl feature I immediately launched the beta, ran the Simulator and looked at the status bar. Sure enough, it was perfect! "They even made it default!" I thought to myself "That's amazing." But no, they hadn't made it default. My simulator was just still operating with the SimulatorStatusMagic overrides applied. 😂

So, now I want to start a campaign to get this switched on by default so we can finally get rid of all the ugly screenshots in the App Store once and for all.

Dave Verwer  

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