1 The home screen
An app introduces itself in a square, then in five frames, then in one line under Get.
Every rounded square on a phone is a small billboard that never stops running. This site looks at how they are made: the icon, the screenshot run and the caption that carry a piece of software into your pocket.
2 The square
The one-inch advertisement
An icon has no room for a sentence. It gets a rounded square, a few colours and maybe one shape, and it has to be read in the time it takes a thumb to pass over it. It sits beside dozens of rivals, all day, at the same size.
So the craft is in subtraction: a silhouette that survives being shrunk, a colour that holds against light and dark wallpaper, a gloss or a flat face that says what era the software belongs to.
3 Five frames
Then the story, told in five screenshots
Open a listing and the square gives way to a strip: a handful of tall frames, each with a headline over a slice of screen. Most people see the first two and decide. Here is an invented tea timer, Steepwell, told the way a listing would tell it.
Tea, timed to the leaf.
Pick what is in the pot.
Watch the ring, not the clock.
It taps you when it is ready.
Same cup, every morning.
4 The Get line
One line under the name
Between the icon and the button there is a single line of text. It is the only full sentence most people will read before they decide, so it gets rewritten more than anything else on the listing.
Some lines describe, some promise, some joke. All of them have to fit beside a thumb.
Get
5 The row
Scroll a category and every square competes
Every name, icon and line in this row is invented for this page. It is a picture of a category, not a list of downloads.
6 Three ways in
Pick a screen
7 Lights down
At the end of the day the screen dims, and every square is still selling.
A thumb hovers over Get. Somewhere behind that button is a whole campaign squeezed into a square, five frames and a line.