Bluesky's Sneaky Logo Trick: How It Hides Its Brand in Screenshots
Bluesky draws its logo on screenshots
Bluesky's iOS app cleverly hides its logo in the UI, only revealing it when users take screenshots. The trick involves a UITextField with secure text entry, which iOS blanks out during screenshots, allowing the logo to appear. The author discovered this by examining the app's open-source code and found similar implementations in Telegram and Signal. The technique is a nifty abuse of privacy APIs, though not universally loved by developers.
When I take the screenshot, iOS hides this UITextField by blanking the layer, allowing the Bluesky logo to flutter its wings through (it was here the whooole time).
- jjcm
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.
- skiing_crawling
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.
- pfraze
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.
- 3form
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.
- wraptile
This is why pocket computers are still so unserious. My programs should not be aware let alone respond to my administrative actions like screenshots.
- internetter
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
- rmwaite
On iOS, if you swipe control center down and then back up but don’t lift your finger, the screenshot will not have the logo. I do this with Twitter so my screenshots don’t have the X logo.
- _djo_
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.
- p0w3n3d
First - it's great that people can't take screenshots of their sensitive data by accident
Second - I hate when my device keeps me from anything. I'm used to have control over my computer, and this is outrageous that I can't take screenshots of anything I want. There should be a god mode or something like that.
- TeMPOraL
Reading between the lines:
Oh, so you can take screenshots of the content that tries to avoid it if you do it mid-switch?
If it's reliable and WONTFIX, that's almost enough to get me to switch away from Android.
Screenshot taking prevention is harmful and should not have ever been allowed to become a platform-level feature in the first place. Because if there's one rule of platform/client interaction, is that if you add a feature that can be abused against customers for stupid reasons, it will be. There's a number of apps I have on my Android phone that block screenshots for dubious reasons, that can be maaaybe charitably explained by calling them "growth hacking pretending to be a security feature", but in some cases even that's a stretch.
This feature should never have existed in the first place.
(At least Bluesky is open about it, both by being Open Source and calling out the "growth hack" by name in source code.)