Well, I have not once found a single case where an app reacting to screenshots and controlling the process in any way was anything to me but hostile and annoying. This one does not help.
It somehow is perfect example of how modern software engineering feels to go astray for me. A feature in my device working completely in benefit of the one providing said software. I wish, and wish only I can, that this trend goes away at some point.
It is actually astonishing to me that this is not something which can be turned off at the OS level, or as a permission setting in the app permissions.
The app knowing I took a screenshot feels adjacent to me to a keylogger. Imagine how many apps are capturing that information silently. To my mind, a screenshot is something that is happening outside of the app context, the app knowing about it is a security flaw imo.
> The app knowing I took a screenshot feels adjacent to me to a keylogger.
To my knowledge, this is a misunderstanding.
The app does not know that you are taking a screenshot, rather iOS knows you are taking a screenshot (as it must) and is excluding an element on display that has been designated by the developer as sensitive information.
This is the same technology that prevents you from accidentally screenshotting your password manager; the developer has simply performed a nifty trick to display a small icon behind where the “follow” button would otherwise be displayed.
There are plenty of instances where this sort of thing can be annoying, such as when you try to screenshot a streaming service app and DRM enforcement leaves you with a blank screenshot, but IMO this particular instance is actually very tasteful; seeing “follow” on every screenshotted post is just useless noise, but a small unobtrusive platform icon is a useful reminder that the post came from Bluesky and not another very visually similar service like X(cancel) or Mastodon.
Did you read the article? Bluesky doesn't know you're taking a screenshot, iOS just hides the follow button in the screenshot (consequently making the Bluesky logo visible).
but you didn't read the part where the mechanism is explained? it doesn't do anything like capturing information. it just marks a button "sensitive" causing it to be hidden in a screenshot, thus revealing an icon that was put there underneath the button.
If someone from Google Maps or LinkedIn team is here, please, when I take a screenshot it's because I want to a screenshot, not share the friggin location/post.
Not sure who got the idea that it was useful, it isn't.
I would happily use the Google Maps "share" feature, but I've yet to encounter any but the simplest of scenarios where it actually preserves the entire context of what I'm trying to share: the viewport, the start and destination, stops along the way, route choice, the time of day, all of it.
If I'm sending a screenshot it's because I want to send exactly what I see on my screen and not have my recipient's gmaps instance happily recompute a route it thinks is better or leave out the routing information I included, or switch from biking to driving directions, or whatever else.
It's of course about lock-in. In the early Web-GIS era there were a few competing but popular notation standards for sharing lat/lon/zoom/<sometimes more> that was meant to be human readable and compatible with any WMS or similar.
Ah... to imagine a world where you could just share a coordinate string and people could open it in whatever map app/page they wanted. Geo URI is probably the closest we have today but I don't think much of anything outside the OS Geo community accepts it.
I think that's actually a separate issue. What I specifically want from a Google Maps share URL is for it to be something I can send over text that will reproduce for my recipient exactly what I see.
A lat/lon/zoom/start?/dest? is kind of what a Google Maps share currently is, but it's neither an interoperable standard nor a reliable capture of the current state, so really the worst of both worlds.
Good thing if you have GMaps open to the directions list while driving and tell Siri to take a screenshot, it doesn’t throw up a full page of nonsense over your directions that only Voice Control (not Siri alone) or a [potentially nonexistent] passenger could close.
From the same lunacy that forces me to write my 30-something character Wi-Fi password on a "secure password field" that only shows me the last character, almost ensuring that I will make an unlimited number of typos and spend way too much time for something that should only take 30 seconds.
It's not clear who it is protecting against, it does not seem to be effective at protecting against anything at all, it is actively annoying to the user, and has no way to disable. Perfect example of the usual "security theater" feature.
Unsecure: open Shortcuts, tap Gallery, search “Adjust Clipboard”. Add to Action Button folder and run from Action Button. - Or add “Dismiss Siri and Continue” action after “Get Clipboard” so you can say “Siri, Adjust Clipboard”.
Type in the still-unreasonably small window, tap Done, paste password. (Then clear clipboard I suppose and consider privacy implication if your clipboard syncs to Mac.)
Apple gave too much power to iOS developers. They can use DRM strong enough that when your iPhone is open in iPhone Mirroring on your Mac, and you record your Mac screen with a third-party tool, the iPhone screen is blacked out.
Side note- The Screenshot culture itself needs to die, sorry. Many a time, a share button simply works. I don’t know why people would share a screenshot or a map instead of pin and share their location. Yes there are cases where a screenshot helps but majority cases simply is “come to this place” a which turns out to make more difficult because people apparently don’t know how to share locations with pin and share!
Screenshots are much better for archival. So many times you go back to a url/link you shared, and poof it's gone or the content has changed from when you sent it.
Screenshots allows you to get a point in time reference to what you are sharing.
Did you read the post? Nothing is hijacked, but its a trick where they render the normal button in a ui element for secret data, which is blanked by the system on screenshot, revealing the logo underneath. Its a reasonable feature, so its hard for apple to control it better or remove this.
That is a lot of words just to make it sound reasonable that a page can be exempt from the underlying screenshot functionality. It isn't. Not without asking the user.
No, it’s not a reasonable feature. If I take a screenshot, I want the image to include what is displayed on my fucking screen, period. What is so difficult about this?
When I take a screenshot in ChatGPT, it shows a "share this chat?" toast at the top.
The toast shows up after the screenshot, but my phones's long screenshot feature captures the top part a second time, so the top part of the chat becomes unreadable.
I also despise this "screenshot blocking" stuff. A device listens is supposed to me, not to the apps. I want a screenshot to be a copy of the raw pixels, and an app should not know about it or have a right to know about it.
Of course this is doable on open source OSes like GrapheneOS, it just sucks that you have to keep modifying the OS every time they release a new version
If it's between this and a perpetual logo, I'll take this any day.
I actually really like this approach. The action button isn't relevant in this context, and it doesn't occlude the content.
There's certainly situations where you wouldn't want this (ie if you're developing the app and you want to redesign starting from a screenshot), but for the average user I think this isn't overly hostile. I understand that people are dogmatically opposed to intent being modified, but I think you need to balance nuance. I actually enjoy having an attributable source in shared elements, and I think this is a low-impact way of achieving that.
This is phone OS developer's fault for even allowing it. When I take a screenshot, I expect to have an image of exactly whatever was displayed on the screen at the time. Its not a picture of your app, its a picture of my screen. Some banking apps used to (or still) prevent this and now some apps get a hook to insert their branding. My device serves some master other than myself.
This is in fact a watermark to promote the application, which otherwise wouldn't be recognizable since Bluesky looks like every other microblogging app. I didn't know that Sam literally named the file GrowthHack.tsx, which is pretty funny.
If the feature can sometimes be useful (including this situation, which some other comments mentioned; but also for other things such as hiding actual secure data), then perhaps it should be made as a setting which can be changed in the setting menu (e.g. "Exclude secure data from screenshots"; it should also mention which apps use this feature), so prevent abuse. (This would also make it clear what the feature is, as well as being able to disable it.)
Nobody in the comments talking about snapchat where like one of the core pillars of what "sets their service apart" is the difficulty of taking a screenshot without notifying the other party
Wasn’t that the entire premise of the product when it launched? Disappearing messages and minimal footprint so you could be confident your communications were semi-private?
That was the expectation of using the product so it fits and isn’t anything like this discussion.
They shouldn't even disallow screenshots from a security measure. If the user wants to take a screenshot of their bank account info or a password manager they should. Maybe an additional permission for screenshare. No device has protection against a second device taking a recording so it's really just security theater
This sort of stuff to me is an example of fear within an organization. Whenever I see engineering resources allocated towards self promotion and branding rather than quality and features for its users it shows how leaders want control over narratives.
It's probably silly to make OP's judgement of any of these implementations in isolation, but you can sense a real fear about the growth (or lack thereof) inside Bluesky. Fiddling with the presented metrics (likes count getting moved ahead of reposts), promoting total user signups while being silent on collapsing DAUs. They are promising a lot at once with AI custom feeds from Attie and subreddit-style communities that smells like feature creep.
That's how a modern organization works. You trust your colleagues will do good work, and will ship something useful and there's not really "someone to go through".
I agree this can be defined as cool and very very likely someone did this on their free time/prompted Claude on the side.
It's a Series B company, it needs to make money, and they have to answer to a board and provide information to investors. They have a roadmap, direction, and leadership. Yes, trust and good intentions is an awesome thing and I hope they have that indeed, but I would think reality lies in the middle of both sides.
I've worked at a Series B company and reality is this is too minor for investors to care on its own, and it's also very hard to correlate this change to new revenue, so not something that's likely to have been done with that intention
I agree that having less people to manage means easier to build trust relationships and culture, though I believe some form of management and control must exist.
Someone spending half a day on a feature that places the app's logo in the screenshot so people seeing it can know where it came from is "fear within an organization"? You've got to be kidding lol
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Well, I have not once found a single case where an app reacting to screenshots and controlling the process in any way was anything to me but hostile and annoying. This one does not help.
It somehow is perfect example of how modern software engineering feels to go astray for me. A feature in my device working completely in benefit of the one providing said software. I wish, and wish only I can, that this trend goes away at some point.
It is actually astonishing to me that this is not something which can be turned off at the OS level, or as a permission setting in the app permissions.
The app knowing I took a screenshot feels adjacent to me to a keylogger. Imagine how many apps are capturing that information silently. To my mind, a screenshot is something that is happening outside of the app context, the app knowing about it is a security flaw imo.
> The app knowing I took a screenshot feels adjacent to me to a keylogger.
To my knowledge, this is a misunderstanding. The app does not know that you are taking a screenshot, rather iOS knows you are taking a screenshot (as it must) and is excluding an element on display that has been designated by the developer as sensitive information. This is the same technology that prevents you from accidentally screenshotting your password manager; the developer has simply performed a nifty trick to display a small icon behind where the “follow” button would otherwise be displayed.
There are plenty of instances where this sort of thing can be annoying, such as when you try to screenshot a streaming service app and DRM enforcement leaves you with a blank screenshot, but IMO this particular instance is actually very tasteful; seeing “follow” on every screenshotted post is just useless noise, but a small unobtrusive platform icon is a useful reminder that the post came from Bluesky and not another very visually similar service like X(cancel) or Mastodon.
Can Snapchat no longer inform the other user when a screenshot was taken?
Did you read the article? Bluesky doesn't know you're taking a screenshot, iOS just hides the follow button in the screenshot (consequently making the Bluesky logo visible).
but you didn't read the part where the mechanism is explained? it doesn't do anything like capturing information. it just marks a button "sensitive" causing it to be hidden in a screenshot, thus revealing an icon that was put there underneath the button.
> hostile and annoying
If someone from Google Maps or LinkedIn team is here, please, when I take a screenshot it's because I want to a screenshot, not share the friggin location/post.
Not sure who got the idea that it was useful, it isn't.
I would happily use the Google Maps "share" feature, but I've yet to encounter any but the simplest of scenarios where it actually preserves the entire context of what I'm trying to share: the viewport, the start and destination, stops along the way, route choice, the time of day, all of it.
If I'm sending a screenshot it's because I want to send exactly what I see on my screen and not have my recipient's gmaps instance happily recompute a route it thinks is better or leave out the routing information I included, or switch from biking to driving directions, or whatever else.
It's of course about lock-in. In the early Web-GIS era there were a few competing but popular notation standards for sharing lat/lon/zoom/<sometimes more> that was meant to be human readable and compatible with any WMS or similar.
Ah... to imagine a world where you could just share a coordinate string and people could open it in whatever map app/page they wanted. Geo URI is probably the closest we have today but I don't think much of anything outside the OS Geo community accepts it.
I think that's actually a separate issue. What I specifically want from a Google Maps share URL is for it to be something I can send over text that will reproduce for my recipient exactly what I see.
A lat/lon/zoom/start?/dest? is kind of what a Google Maps share currently is, but it's neither an interoperable standard nor a reliable capture of the current state, so really the worst of both worlds.
(Also, hi AB! Nice to see you on here)
Good thing if you have GMaps open to the directions list while driving and tell Siri to take a screenshot, it doesn’t throw up a full page of nonsense over your directions that only Voice Control (not Siri alone) or a [potentially nonexistent] passenger could close.
Oh wait it absolutely does.
Today I noticed that Amazon Pharmacy decided to blank out my prescription info that I was screenshotting to send to my doctor. WTF.
From the same lunacy that forces me to write my 30-something character Wi-Fi password on a "secure password field" that only shows me the last character, almost ensuring that I will make an unlimited number of typos and spend way too much time for something that should only take 30 seconds.
It's not clear who it is protecting against, it does not seem to be effective at protecting against anything at all, it is actively annoying to the user, and has no way to disable. Perfect example of the usual "security theater" feature.
Super secure!!1one
Unsecure: open Shortcuts, tap Gallery, search “Adjust Clipboard”. Add to Action Button folder and run from Action Button. - Or add “Dismiss Siri and Continue” action after “Get Clipboard” so you can say “Siri, Adjust Clipboard”.
Type in the still-unreasonably small window, tap Done, paste password. (Then clear clipboard I suppose and consider privacy implication if your clipboard syncs to Mac.)
Apple gave too much power to iOS developers. They can use DRM strong enough that when your iPhone is open in iPhone Mirroring on your Mac, and you record your Mac screen with a third-party tool, the iPhone screen is blacked out.
And if you take a screenshot of a product in the Amazon app it hijacks that and copies a link instead.
Blame Apple for even allowing apps to be aware of the user taking a screenshot.
Just like their iCloud Keychain API that lets apps secretly track users across app reinstalls and device resets.
Getting your account back on reinstall is good
Maybe, so long as it's optional.
I can fucking type my username and password, thank you.
And I prefer to see and choose the data an app stores on my fucking ICLOUD ACCOUNT. And fucking DELETE it when I want.
There's no way to do that from an iOS device.
Side note- The Screenshot culture itself needs to die, sorry. Many a time, a share button simply works. I don’t know why people would share a screenshot or a map instead of pin and share their location. Yes there are cases where a screenshot helps but majority cases simply is “come to this place” a which turns out to make more difficult because people apparently don’t know how to share locations with pin and share!
Screenshots are much better for archival. So many times you go back to a url/link you shared, and poof it's gone or the content has changed from when you sent it.
Screenshots allows you to get a point in time reference to what you are sharing.
It still baffles me that it has become normal for an OS to place the wishes of an app above those of the user.
Hijacking the screenshot process is a privilege that you ought to be able to revoke, it's insane to allow software to be given more control.
And don't tell me it's anything to do with security when it can be circumvented in any number of ways.
Did you read the post? Nothing is hijacked, but its a trick where they render the normal button in a ui element for secret data, which is blanked by the system on screenshot, revealing the logo underneath. Its a reasonable feature, so its hard for apple to control it better or remove this.
That is a lot of words just to make it sound reasonable that a page can be exempt from the underlying screenshot functionality. It isn't. Not without asking the user.
users should have some way to control if screenshots have secret data in them or not, really. what if I do actually need to preserve it?
No, it’s not a reasonable feature. If I take a screenshot, I want the image to include what is displayed on my fucking screen, period. What is so difficult about this?
When I take a screenshot in ChatGPT, it shows a "share this chat?" toast at the top.
The toast shows up after the screenshot, but my phones's long screenshot feature captures the top part a second time, so the top part of the chat becomes unreadable.
I also despise this "screenshot blocking" stuff. A device listens is supposed to me, not to the apps. I want a screenshot to be a copy of the raw pixels, and an app should not know about it or have a right to know about it.
Of course this is doable on open source OSes like GrapheneOS, it just sucks that you have to keep modifying the OS every time they release a new version
> I wish, and wish only I can, that this trend goes away at some point.
You don't have to wish, in this scenario. Bluesky supports third-party clients, you can use one that has a more minimal featureset if you prefer.
For Bluesky, sure. I think the comment was aimed at the trend.
Android and iOS should not let apps do this, because it can be (ab)used by apps that you can’t really choose not to use.
I know there’s a popular bank in my country that completely blocks screenshots and screen recordings on Android somehow.
If it's between this and a perpetual logo, I'll take this any day.
I actually really like this approach. The action button isn't relevant in this context, and it doesn't occlude the content.
There's certainly situations where you wouldn't want this (ie if you're developing the app and you want to redesign starting from a screenshot), but for the average user I think this isn't overly hostile. I understand that people are dogmatically opposed to intent being modified, but I think you need to balance nuance. I actually enjoy having an attributable source in shared elements, and I think this is a low-impact way of achieving that.
This is phone OS developer's fault for even allowing it. When I take a screenshot, I expect to have an image of exactly whatever was displayed on the screen at the time. Its not a picture of your app, its a picture of my screen. Some banking apps used to (or still) prevent this and now some apps get a hook to insert their branding. My device serves some master other than myself.
iOS allows something similar. twitter (X) will also add a logo. I believe reddit did the same but i stopped using their app a while ago.
> The “Follow” button is visible when I take the screenshot mid-switch.
Does this indicate that the privacy feature has a gap, where you could reveal the length of your password if you take a screenshot mid app switch?
This is in fact a watermark to promote the application, which otherwise wouldn't be recognizable since Bluesky looks like every other microblogging app. I didn't know that Sam literally named the file GrowthHack.tsx, which is pretty funny.
If the feature can sometimes be useful (including this situation, which some other comments mentioned; but also for other things such as hiding actual secure data), then perhaps it should be made as a setting which can be changed in the setting menu (e.g. "Exclude secure data from screenshots"; it should also mention which apps use this feature), so prevent abuse. (This would also make it clear what the feature is, as well as being able to disable it.)
Nobody in the comments talking about snapchat where like one of the core pillars of what "sets their service apart" is the difficulty of taking a screenshot without notifying the other party
Wasn’t that the entire premise of the product when it launched? Disappearing messages and minimal footprint so you could be confident your communications were semi-private?
That was the expectation of using the product so it fits and isn’t anything like this discussion.
X and Threads do this too. I wish they all wouldn't, messing with screenshots should only ever be done when preventing them as a security measure.
They shouldn't even disallow screenshots from a security measure. If the user wants to take a screenshot of their bank account info or a password manager they should. Maybe an additional permission for screenshare. No device has protection against a second device taking a recording so it's really just security theater
Even preventing them shouldn't be possible. It's just security theater anyway. You can easily capture it with another camera.
Reddit as well. Although they let you disable it from what I remember.
This sort of stuff to me is an example of fear within an organization. Whenever I see engineering resources allocated towards self promotion and branding rather than quality and features for its users it shows how leaders want control over narratives.
It's equally possible there was one engineer with some free time who thought it would be cool.
It's probably silly to make OP's judgement of any of these implementations in isolation, but you can sense a real fear about the growth (or lack thereof) inside Bluesky. Fiddling with the presented metrics (likes count getting moved ahead of reposts), promoting total user signups while being silent on collapsing DAUs. They are promising a lot at once with AI custom feeds from Attie and subreddit-style communities that smells like feature creep.
Implementing a watermark isn't a thing anyone thinks is a cool feature they want to try out.
what do you mean, it's a very normal cool thing that everyone loves
Sent from my Ryobi Riding Lawnmower
And such engineer would have enough organizational clout to just ship it without going through anyone?
That's how a modern organization works. You trust your colleagues will do good work, and will ship something useful and there's not really "someone to go through".
I agree this can be defined as cool and very very likely someone did this on their free time/prompted Claude on the side.
It's a Series B company, it needs to make money, and they have to answer to a board and provide information to investors. They have a roadmap, direction, and leadership. Yes, trust and good intentions is an awesome thing and I hope they have that indeed, but I would think reality lies in the middle of both sides.
I've worked at a Series B company and reality is this is too minor for investors to care on its own, and it's also very hard to correlate this change to new revenue, so not something that's likely to have been done with that intention
Bluesky has <100 employees so it could be possible
I agree that having less people to manage means easier to build trust relationships and culture, though I believe some form of management and control must exist.
I'm sure this wasn't even in the top 10 of things that we made sam implement out of fear
You're fun
Someone spending half a day on a feature that places the app's logo in the screenshot so people seeing it can know where it came from is "fear within an organization"? You've got to be kidding lol
Perplexity does this on web by adding a logo in response to key combos for normal screenshot shortcuts.
I’ve noticed that if you screenshot a thread in the threads app an “@threads” logo appears in the upper right corner
To be fair this is useful for discovering bluesky from screenshots getting posted on other platforms.
Their product UI kind of looks like X, so it's helpful to know the source of a post
I don't think anyone doubts that it benefits the company.
If only there was some uniform way to identify a resource. But it might lead people out of the walled garden so best not to risk it.
I think RevenueCat does the same thing. Smart way to exploit network effects!
Tiktok has been watermarking videos since the beginning.
Is this iPhone only? I've never seen this on Android.
It's iOS only, relying on iOS to exclude isSecureTextEntry things from screenshots:
https://github.com/mozzius/expo-privacy-sensitive/blob/main/...
X does the same thing.
Just since Nikita joined (altho now he's gone, doubt they will remove it tho)
Example n+1 of why I only use web and not download an app
has this guy lived on a rock? reddit/twitter/etc every social media platform does this already.
It's pretty likely that bluesky users aren't on other social media. Because it pretends to be better than them (this shows it isn't really, though)
I know you don't think it's bluesky, but which app do you think is better at putting its logo on screenshots?
As Spring inevitably leads to Winter, and Night follows Day, Thus the Inevitable Enshittification of all Centralized Platforms
This is arguably missing the "how" from the title -- can someone fix?
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@Dang: I would like to report an innocent victim to the automatic "How"-Removal.
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