Galaxy stellar mass function evolution as derived from different stellar mass estimates. The solid blue lines correspond to the estimate using the intrinsic stellar masses from the GAEA run. The dashed red lines show the predicted evolution using $M_{\star }^{\text{app}}$, i.e., the stellar mass derived from synthetic photometry under the hypothesis of a universal MW-like IMF (see text for more details). The gray points represent the observational data points as in the compilation from Fontanot et al. (2009).