What This Tool Actually Draws
An iMessage screenshot is not a photo of text — it is a specific arrangement of interface parts, and missing any one of them is what makes a fake look fake. This generator draws all of them on a canvas: a status bar with the time, signal bars, Wi-Fi arcs and a battery; a navigation bar with a back chevron, a contact avatar and a name; an optional date divider; the bubbles themselves; and the message input bar at the bottom with the grey iMessage placeholder.
The geometry follows Apple's layout rather than an approximation. Bubbles cap at 70% of the screen width, use a 19-pixel corner radius, and sit in a column with 14 pixels of breathing room between them. Body text is 17 pixels with a 24-pixel line height, left-aligned inside a 17-pixel inset. Outgoing messages are #0b84ff — the exact blue iOS uses — and incoming ones are #e9e9eb in light mode, #26252a in dark. Get those four numbers wrong and the eye notices even when it cannot say why.
Everything is drawn at 720 pixels wide and rendered at 1:1 on the page, so what you see is what you save. The download doubles the canvas to 1440 pixels with smoothing on, because interface text — unlike pixel art — is supposed to be antialiased.
How To Use It
- Name the contact. Whatever you type goes into the navigation bar, and its first letter becomes the avatar. Use a first name only; real iMessage shows a saved contact name, not a handle.
- Set the clock. 9:41 is the time Apple uses in every product photo, so it reads as "official". Any time works, but 9:41 is the most convincing default and it is why it is pre-filled.
- Write the conversation, one line per bubble. Start a line with > to make it an incoming message from the other person; leave it off and the line is yours, drawn on the right in blue. The > is stripped before drawing, so it never appears in the image.
- Pick the date divider. Today is the safe choice. Yesterday 11:14 PM is useful when the joke depends on the conversation being late at night.
- Render, then download. The PNG is 1440 pixels wide — enough to post on Instagram without upscaling, and enough to drop into a video edit without visible softness.
Two craft notes. Keep bubbles short: real people text in fragments, and a 40-word paragraph in one bubble is the single most common tell in a fake screenshot. And alternate more than you think you should — a real exchange has uneven rhythm, with double-texts and one-word replies.
What Makes A Fake Text Look Real
People who spot fakes professionally — moderators, journalists, and anyone who has been burned — look at a short list of details. Here is the same list, so you can decide whether your image survives it.
- The tail direction. Incoming bubbles have a tail on the left, outgoing on the right. A bubble with a tail on the wrong side is the fastest giveaway. This tool handles it automatically, and you can switch tails off entirely if you prefer the cleaner look some iOS versions use in group chats.
- Font weight, not font. iOS uses SF Pro. On a Windows or Android machine it will fall back to Segoe UI or Roboto, which are close but not identical — the lowercase a and the digit 1 differ most. For a joke this is invisible; for a screenshot meant to deceive it is not, and that is a good thing.
- Status bar consistency. The clock in the status bar and any time you mention in the conversation should not contradict each other. Nor should the battery say 3% in a screenshot that supposedly spans an hour of texting.
- Bubble count versus screen height. Twenty messages in a single screen with no scroll indicator is physically impossible on a real phone. This generator grows the canvas instead of cramming, which keeps the proportions honest.
- Carrier and notch. Modern iPhones do not display a carrier name, and they do show a Dynamic Island or notch. This tool deliberately omits carrier text, because including it dates the image to an older phone.
When A Fake Screenshot Stops Being A Joke
Most people making these images are doing something harmless: a meme, a fictional story, a joke with a friend, a character's conversation for a fan edit. That is the intended use and it is why the tool is free.
It becomes something else the moment it is used to make a real person believe something false. Faking a message from someone to damage their reputation, inventing a confession, manufacturing "proof" in a dispute, or dressing up a scam as a conversation with a bank or a delivery company — those are the cases that get people suspended, sued, or worse, and in many countries the creation of such an image is itself an offence regardless of whether anyone acts on it.
Practical rule: if the screenshot would need a caption saying "this is fake" for the person seeing it to be treated fairly, put the caption on the image itself. A small "for entertainment" line in the corner costs nothing and settles the question of intent before anyone has to argue about it.
iMessage Versus Android Messages
The two look different enough that mixing them is another common tell. This tool draws iOS only, so it is worth knowing what you are and are not reproducing.
- Bubble colour. iOS uses blue for iMessage and green for SMS to non-Apple phones. Android's default Messages app uses blue-ish grey for RCS and a lighter grey for SMS, with no green at all.
- Corner radius. iOS bubbles are noticeably rounder relative to their height than Android's, which are closer to a rounded rectangle with tighter corners.
- Timestamps. iOS hides per-message timestamps and shows them only when you drag the conversation sideways; Android often prints them under each bubble.
- Read receipts. iOS shows "Delivered" or "Read" under the last outgoing message in small grey text. Android shows a small double tick or nothing.
- Input bar. iOS has the circular arrow on the right and the plus on the left. Android puts an emoji icon and a send triangle there instead.
If you need an Android look, this is the wrong tool — the bubble geometry and the input bar would both be wrong, and fixing one without the other produces something worse than either.
Why Everything Is Rendered On A Canvas
The obvious way to build this would be HTML and CSS, then a screenshot library. That approach has two problems: the library is a large dependency, and its output depends on the fonts installed on the visitor's machine, so the same conversation would render differently on Windows and on macOS.
Drawing on a canvas removes both. The layout is arithmetic — measure the text, wrap at 70% width, add 34 pixels of horizontal padding, stack with a 14-pixel gap — so the result is identical everywhere. The download is then a straight copy of the same canvas at double size, which means the PNG cannot disagree with the preview. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, and the whole thing runs from a single page with no external libraries at all.
Making A Conversation Read Naturally
The interface is the easy part. What separates a screenshot that people believe from one they scroll past is whether the conversation sounds like two people actually texting, and that is a writing problem rather than a rendering one.
Length is the first tell. Real text messages are short — usually under a dozen words, frequently under five. People send "ok", "wait", "where", "on my way" as entire messages, because the send button is free and there is no reason to compose. A single bubble containing a well-formed 30-word sentence with a subordinate clause reads as an email that wandered into a phone. Break the thought across two or three bubbles instead; that is what a person does when they are typing with one thumb.
Punctuation is the second. Most people drop the final period in a text, keep the question mark, and use no capital letters at all. Perfect punctuation with correct capitalisation on every line is the signature of someone writing carefully — which is not what texting looks like. Sprinkle in a missing apostrophe, a lowercase "i", or a double space after a comma, and the whole exchange instantly sounds more human.
Turn-taking should be uneven. A strict alternation of you-them-you-them for eight messages is a rhythm nobody has. Real threads contain double texts, a message that answers nothing, one person sending three short bubbles in a row while the other says one word, and a gap where someone left the room. You cannot draw a time gap, but you can draw its effect: the reply that clearly responds to something two messages back.
Give the two people different voices. If both sides write in the same register with the same habits, the conversation reads as one person talking to themselves — which, technically, it is. Decide before you type whether the other person is terser, more formal, more chaotic, or more polite, and let that show in bubble length and punctuation alone. You do not need slang or emoji to differentiate them; sentence length does most of the work.
End it on something small. Screenshots that stop mid-exchange are more believable than ones with a tidy resolution, because real conversations do not conclude — they just stop. A final one-word reply, or a question left hanging, reads as a genuine capture rather than a scripted scene.
Frequently Asked Questions About Fake Text Screenshots
The questions below are the ones that come up most often, with answers that apply to this tool specifically rather than to screenshot makers in general.
FAQs
No. It is a drawing made to look like the iMessage interface, rendered by your browser. Nothing is captured from a phone, and the image contains no metadata that would identify a device.
Start that line with a > character. The line is then drawn on the left in grey, and the > is removed before rendering so it never shows in the image.
Apple has used 9:41 in its own product photography since the first iPhone keynote, because it is roughly the time the presentation reached the demo. It reads as authentic to most viewers, so it is a sensible default.
Not on this page — one image is one conversation with one contact. Two separate images is the honest way to show a conversation with two people, since a real phone also shows only one thread at a time.
iOS uses SF Pro. On Windows and Android the browser falls back to Segoe UI or Roboto, which are metrically similar but not identical. The image is still clean; it is simply not pixel-identical to a real iPhone capture.
No. The text stays in your browser and is drawn locally. There is no upload, no account and no server-side copy — closing the tab discards it.
1440 pixels wide, at double the on-screen size, with antialiasing enabled so small interface text stays readable when the image is posted or resized.
Yes — set Bubble tail to No tail. Group chats and some later iOS versions render without tails, so the flat look is still plausible.
Because recent iPhones do not show one. Adding "AT&T" or "Verizon" would date the image to an older device and is one of the details people use to spot a fake.
Making one for entertainment, fiction or a joke is generally fine. Using it to deceive someone, damage a reputation, or support a fraud is not, and in many jurisdictions creating such an image is an offence on its own. That is on you, not on the tool — see the disclaimer for the full position.
Yes. The output is yours, with no watermark and no attribution required. Note that "iMessage" and "iPhone" are Apple trademarks — do not imply the image is an official Apple screenshot or use it in a way that suggests endorsement.