Every mobile developer needs to take app screenshots in order to have their app listed on the app stores. Like a book cover, screenshots are crucial in depicting the best parts of your app and convincing potential users to download it.

Unfortunately, generating app screenshots is a huge pain because they take a ton of time, especially if your app supports different locales and languages. For example, if you need to take 5 screenshots for your app store listing - but your app supports 20 languages for 6 devices - you’ll manually have to take 600 screenshots (5 x 20 x 6)! It makes us shudder to think how many precious hours that would eat up.

fastlane’s snapshot tool automates the process of taking screenshots (in the background) so you can focus on building features users love. Today, we’re excited to share that snapshot now supports multiple, concurrent simulators for iOS apps in Xcode 9. Taking screenshots just got even faster because you can now generate screenshots for all of your devices at the same time!

Speeding up screenshots (even more!)

Before Xcode 9, only one simulator could be running at a time, which means that you had to run snapshot once for each device you wish to support. While snapshot automated the process of taking screenshots, we wanted to make things even easier.

The launch of Xcode 9 gave us another opportunity to improve snapshot. In Xcode 9, multiple UI tests can run simultaneously, so we added multiple simulator support to snapshot as well. Now, you can take screenshots for all specified devices with a single command, at the same time. This drastically shortens the time it takes to generate your screenshots.

Here's an example: