As we all know, it’s very time consuming to keep help center articles up to date with screenshots. New features get released, UI/UX changes and support teams need to scramble to keep up.
To assist with this task, I’m looking into ways to automate the generation of screenshots from my company’s mobile app (on both Android and iOS). The idea would be to systematically “scrape” every screen that a user can interact with in the app to produce an organized catalog of screenshots that my team can simply reference and plug into help center articles as needed.
Does anyone know if any 3rd party tools exist which might help with this task? Open to any ideas no matter how unconventional, thanks in advance!
Answered
Are there any 3rd party tools for generating screenshots from mobile apps?
Best answer by Melinda Brown
Hi Brendan,
I have found Loom to be useful for capturing screenshots and videos on both desktop and mobile devices.
Melinda
Hi Brendan,
I have found Loom to be useful for capturing screenshots and videos on both desktop and mobile devices.
Melinda
Just updating my own post with my progress…
For our Android app, I’ve been experimenting with the Firebase TestLab. It can crawl through the app, but gets stuck in dead ends.
I’m also looking into scripting cross-platform yaml scripts using https://maestro.dev/ which has the ability to capture not just screenshots but screen recordings. Seems promising, but also a fair bit of manual work to set up and I’m not sure how durable the flows defined in the yaml will prove over time.
Still hoping to find a turn key, one-click, full automated solution for this...
Hey
Full disclosure: I'm the founder of LaunchBrightly (screenshot automation), so take this with the appropriate grain of salt. We primarily focus on web applications rather than native mobile apps specifically.
That said, we've worked with teams that run automations against responsive/mobile views and emulator-based environments to generate screenshots at scale for mobile experiences. The general idea is to create automation recipes (repeatable user journeys), capture the resulting screens automatically (and add annotations when needed), and then run those workflows on a schedule (say, every Sunday night) to detect changes over time.
Where it gets interesting isn't just the machine generation of screenshots, it's keeping existing documentation current. In our case, we connect to Intercom natively, read existing articles, identify which screenshots have drifted from the current product (given we have a new fresh set of screenshot every Sunday), and then help update those images directly in your articles.
For true native iOS and Android apps, I do agree that the best path forward is probably something in the testing-automation sphere.
Anyhow, you asked about third-party tools, and that's exactly the category I'd put us in :-) ... even if you end up taking a different route, I'm a big fan of thinking about both screenshot generation and screenshot maintenance. In practice, generating screenshots is only half the challenge for many, keeping hundreds (if not thousands) of screenshots synced with all your articles is where many teams see the other part of the challenge arrive.
Cheers
/ Dennis :-)
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