Wallet mockup screenshots: what App Store review actually rejects

The same search is typed by two people who want opposite things. One is preparing a store listing and has no data yet. The other wants a number on a screen to be believed. This article is for the first, and says plainly why we are no use to the second.

Published: 1 September 2026 · Last reviewed: 27 September 2026

Two searches, one phrase

Search for a fake version of a well-known wallet app and the results page tells you who else is looking. Alongside a handful of demo tools, you get the wallet makers’ own scam-awareness guides, articles on how wallet compromises happen, and forum threads full of people who were defrauded. Search engines classify that neighbourhood accurately, because most of the demand there really is about deception.

The other half of the demand is ordinary product work. Someone is shipping a wallet, an exchange, a portfolio tracker or a fintech app. The build is not finished, or it is finished and empty, and the store listing needs five images by Friday. They reach for the most recognisable reference they know and type its name. What they actually need is a screen of their own.

Those two jobs share a phrase and nothing else. Everything below is about the second one. If the plan is to show a balance to someone who will act on it (a lender, an investor, a buyer), no tool makes that legitimate, and this one is not built for it: it reads no chain and asks for no key, its public demo stamps a demonstration mark across the screen, and our terms forbid presenting any screen from the wallet as a statement of account or proof of funds.

What a “wallet-style” screenshot actually describes

Strip the branding and the request points at a layout, not a company. Modern crypto wallets converged on the same arrangement because it solves the same problem: the total comes first at display size, the day’s change sits directly under it in green or red, the assets follow as rows carrying an icon, a name, a quantity and a value, and navigation is a horizontal strip of pills rather than a bottom tab bar.

None of that belongs to anyone. It is the same category of convention as a music player putting transport controls at the bottom, or a mail client putting the list on the left. We measured this arrangement rather than guessing at it, and wrote down the geometry in the anatomy of a crypto wallet screen. Building on those conventions is normal design practice.

What does belong to someone: the wordmark, the icon, the exact palette used as an identity, the product name. That is the line, and it is a clean one.

Where the line is drawn, and who draws it

Apple draws it in the App Review Guidelines, and the wording leaves little room. Guideline 5.2.1 tells developers not to use protected third-party material such as trademarks without permission, and rules out copycat representations, names, or metadata. Guideline 4.1(c) is narrower and blunter: another developer’s icon, brand or product name cannot appear in yours without their approval. Guideline 4.1(b) treats impersonating another service as a Developer Code of Conduct matter, which escalates past a rejection to the account itself.

Read those together and the practical rule is simple. A reviewer looking at your screenshots asks whose product they appear to show. If the answer is anyone but you, the submission has a problem, and it does not matter whether the image came from a screen capture, a design file or a generator.

There is a pattern worth noticing in this market. Several tools selling wallet replicas spell the brands they copy with digits substituted for letters. Changing letters does not change what the name refers to, and it does not take the product outside trademark law.

Nominative use is not the same thing

Naming a product in order to discuss it is ordinary and lawful: a review, a comparison or a news story does it every day. What is not ordinary is wearing the name to attract the traffic that belongs to it, or shipping an interface that a user could mistake for the original. Reference is speech. Imitation is substitution.

The practical version for anyone shipping an app: describe the category in your metadata, never a competitor’s brand. “Crypto wallet” is a category. A named wallet is somebody’s trademark.

The rejections that actually happen

Trademark problems are the loudest failure but not the most frequent. In practice the same handful recur, and most are mechanical:

• A visible third-party mark. A logo, wordmark or product name inside the screen, including in a token row, which is where people forget to look.
• A screen that is not the app. Guideline 2.3.3 asks that screenshots show the app in use. A splash screen, a login form or a marketing poster with a phone drawn on it does not qualify.
• Metadata that promises more than the build does. Guideline 2.3.1(a) covers marketing an app in a misleading way. A screenshot showing a feature that is not in the submitted binary falls squarely inside it.
• Format faults. An alpha channel, a CMYK export, a device frame baked into the image, or dimensions that do not match a declared display class. These are the most common of all and the easiest to prevent; we listed them with the numbers in why App Store screenshots get rejected.

The part nobody checks until it fails

Assume the brand question is settled and the screen is yours. The image still has to be right. Screenshots are specified in pixels, and the resolution chain is unforgiving: the numbers Apple accepts, which sets scale automatically and which it refuses, are collected in what resolution App Store screenshots should be.

Two details betray a hand-assembled wallet screen faster than any of that. The status bar is the first: a mismatched time, a battery that changes between images in the same set, a carrier label that contradicts the region you are submitting to. The measured dimensions are in the iPhone status bar reference. The second is the token icons: pulled from different sources, they arrive on different grids, with different padding and inconsistent shapes, and a row of them reads as assembled rather than rendered. That failure has its own article, token icons: sizes, shapes and traps.

What to do instead

Draw your own screen using the conventions, put your own name and mark on it, and populate it with data you invented. You end up with something you can submit, defend and reuse, and you keep the ability to produce twenty variants, which a real device capture of an empty app cannot give you.

If the app has no users yet, that is the normal case rather than an obstacle: how to make App Store screenshots when the app has no users covers the approach. If the image is destined for a deck instead of a listing, the constraints change and showing a crypto portfolio in a pitch deck takes it from there.

And the plain version of the rule this whole article circles: a mockup is honest when the viewer knows what they are looking at. Presenting one as evidence of holdings is not a review problem. It is a different problem, with different consequences, and it is outside what this tool is for.

Questions

Can I make a screenshot that looks like a well-known wallet app?

Reproducing another company’s interface, icon or product name breaches App Review guidelines 5.2.1 and 4.1(c), however the image was made.

What is allowed, then?

A mockup that uses the shared visual conventions of a crypto wallet (balance first, token rows, pill tabs) under your own brand. The difference is not visual polish; it is whose marks appear.

Written by My Larp Wallet, a crypto wallet app simulator: a mockup that opens on your phone, never a real wallet. For your own app’s screenshots, shoot your build; where a wallet mockup fits, and where it does not.