Look at almost any contemporary scene and count the screens: a phone in someone's hand, a laptop on the desk, a TV in the background, a tablet at the till. Every one of them is a graphics decision, and every one is a potential clearance problem. The trouble is that screens are easy to wave away in prep - "we'll sort it on the day" - and expensive to fix once the footage exists.
Three ways to handle a brand on screen
Broadly, you have three options for anything visible and recognisable. You can clear it - get permission to show the real thing, which is slow, sometimes costly, and never guaranteed. You can avoid it - frame around it, blur it, turn it off - which limits the director on the day. Or you can design a fictional or cleared version - a believable not-quite-real newspaper, a packaging label, an app that reads true but belongs to no one. The third route is usually the one that keeps everyone safe and keeps control on your side.
The hard case: live screens
Static graphics are manageable. The genuinely awkward one is the interactive phone - an actor reading and sending messages, scrolling, taking a call, while the screen is on camera. Traditionally that means one of two things: shoot it live with a real interface and replace the screen in post (slow, costly, and a clearance exposure if the UI is a real product), or fake it with a static playback that the actor can't really interact with.
This is exactly the problem Mombie was built to remove. It's a real-time messaging-prop simulator: fully controllable, believable phone screens that the actor interacts with for real, on camera, with no screen replacement in post and no clearance risk from a trademarked interface.
Catch it in the breakdown
The common thread is timing. A screen flagged during the breakdown is a quiet design task; the same screen discovered in the edit is a reshoot or a VFX line item. That's why I push screen and graphic items into the script breakdown early - and why Skenic surfaces them scene by scene, so nothing recognisable reaches the floor without a plan.
Screens aren't going to get rarer in the films we make. Treating them as a prep decision rather than a post surprise is the whole game.