iOS Simulator Demo Video
Records a polished demo video of an iOS app in the simulator, with scripted taps, touch circles and an automatic edit.
I built this while making the demo video for Damon Mobile, my phone app for talking to coding agents. The simulator recorder never shows your taps, drops frames when the Mac is busy, and leaves you with a long, uneven recording to cut by hand.
The skill fixes all of that. Claude drives the app with a UI test so every take is the same, draws circles where it taps, then edits the video from the video itself. Every rule in it is something that ruined a take first.
What it does
- Adds a demo mode to your app that hides anything private, like client names or personal tabs.
- Draws touch circles on screen, above sheets too.
- Drives the whole demo with an XCUITest instead of by hand.
- Records with a clean status bar: 9:41, full battery, full signal.
- Cuts from the video itself, speeding up long waits and trimming the launch and the home screen, then encodes it for X.
How it works
- Turn on demo mode and touch circles with a launch argument.
- Record the simulator with xcrun simctl while the UI test runs.
- Find the real start, the long waits and the end by measuring frame-to-frame motion, not test timestamps, which drift from the video.
- Convert to a constant 60 fps, trim, encode, then check the cut on contact sheets before calling it done.
What you need
- macOS with Xcode and an iOS simulator runtime
- ffmpeg
- Claude Code
- Your app's Xcode project
Install it
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/ios-simulator-demo-video
curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/per-simmons/ios-simulator-demo-video/main/SKILL.md -o ~/.claude/skills/ios-simulator-demo-video/SKILL.mdThe reference implementation (the UI test, the touch-circle view and the record-and-cut script) is in the public damon-mobile repo; the skill links to it.
The full instructions, and the skill itself, are on GitHub.
Try asking
- “Record a demo video of my app in the simulator.”
- “Make a tweet-ready demo of the onboarding flow, with the taps showing.”
- “Re-cut that recording: speed up the waits and trim the ending.”
Good to know
- It records the simulator, not a phone. Say so in any caption. For guaranteed-smooth footage, use the iPhone's own Screen Recording.
- A busy Mac drops whole seconds from the recording. Close screen recorders and screen sharing first.
