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.
Consider the possibility that many HN users, who likely also constantly ask why mice are needed when vim/Emacs exist, are not the users who mostly use regular apps.
Uh, no? I highly doubt that a non-occluding watermark on screenshots is even in the top 100 gripes most people have with X. And I don't use either platform. If anything your argument is an accusation of bias without any discussion of merits.
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.
> I expect to have an image of exactly whatever was displayed on the screen at the time
Do you/should you (we) really expect that though? I regularly use color filters on my apple devices— grayscale to avoid distractions during the day and red tint at night. More recently I’ve been using the motion dots. I don’t know that I can say with confidence that I never want any of those “personal-perceptional-modifiers” to appear in a screenshot, but for most folks, I would guess it’s approximately never.
It’s so if an app is showing a password or bank account number or other piece of sensitive information it doesn’t accidentally end up in a screenshot. I think there are other places sensitive information won’t show.
Bluesky, and apparently others, are abusing the functionality for advertising purposes.
I think it’s a good thing it’s there. This functionality should be easy for apps.
I’d say this is one for app review or an App Store rule. But we all know those are a total joke.
The app doesn't know. It just produces a widget tree, and the OS-provided renderer renders it this way or that way. In particular, it chooses not to render controls marked as "security-sensitive" when the rendering is intended for a screenshot; it could instead put empty boxes in their place, etc. The app has no idea and no control, AFAIK.
Reddit has a toggle in its settings to disable it. X, too, I think.
Personally, I wish iOS didn't even facilitate this.
edit: to be clear, I don't think iOS should notify the app at all. The app could register areas as "invisible to screenshots" perhaps - I'm torn on that functionality.
The thing that really irritates me about the banking apps blocking screenshots is that it's pretty clear to me it's not about protecting customers but denying customers the ability to document something related to their account.
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.
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.
This prevents us from taking scrolling screenshots (a native feature in many smartphones today that is often useful when there is more than one screen of content).
I dislike this hijacking for that reason and wish there was a way to turn it off.
Very interesting!
Parent poster is correct, this does feel akin to a key logger.
So in this instance, am I right in understanding that iOS posts a notification after the user has completed a screenshot, which would make it impossible for the developer to use this notification to trigger anything that would modify that screenshot? Hence the developer’s work around?
If you screenshot what you are listening to, after the screenshot is taken spotify will open a full-screen popup to "share" the song you are listening to. This is quite dumb, especially since if you wanted to share a song via the screenshot, you can do so in the OS-level screenshot UI, and then you would close it and see Spotify's own similar version of the same UI. Spotify just really wants you to use their own share button so that they can track you.
I’ve seen another app do that but for a different reason. It’s for security cameras and they use it to show a “hey idiot just press the save a picture button, don’t take screenshots” popup, which is also hostile.
I’m not sure why the app needs to be notified. There must be some use but I can’t think of it off the top of my head.
"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"
And that is reasonable, but it is also a surface where an app touches the OS, which should be a permission boundary that I can control. Allowing the option to opt-out of screenshot blocking with a proper double-confirm warning and biometric auth is also reasonable.
> This is the same technology that prevents you from accidentally screenshotting your password manager
Yes, and I would say it's a bad thing that the OS tries to prevent this.
> 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.
I would say it's a bad thing that Bluesky makes the screenshot look different from what was on screen for the user. If I cared about excluding the "useless noise" from a faithful depiction of the pixels on my screen, I could address that myself.
As someone who develops apps for confidential conversations, making it harder for people to screenshot the confidential stuff is a feature the sending party wants, that is why they send in your app as opposed to others. It doesn’t make things impossible, just hard enough that 95% of people won’t bother to take a copy.
Same for example with disappearing audio messages on whatsapp
What I don’t like is the app being informed that I took a screenshot. The OS can hide things in screenshots without this.
Neither of those use cases seem good or tasteful to me as a user, I don't think this concept of "secure (from the user) context" should exist, but maybe that's just me
the other device then likely indexes it after a brief once-over by its own ai-enabled os. any crossover interactions, and it may as well be the same device. maybe some of you have not experimented enough with the theshold to have noticed yet.
I think bsky's use of this malware feature is as benign as it's possible to get, but it's still a malware feature. As you point out, the real reason this exists is to enforce DRM and make your computer serve Netflix et al rather than the person who owns it.
> accidentally screenshotting your password manager;
I could not think of a more useless justification for installing malware into the OS. Okay, you've accidentally screenshotted your password manager. So what? Are you going to accidentally upload it to the internet too? I'd much rather live in a world where people who are that stupid face minor consequences for their actions than one in which all of our own computers are used against us.
> The app knowing I took a screenshot feels adjacent to me to a keylogger.
That is what this article is about and why you should read it before commenting. The whole point is that it doesn't need to know you're taking screenshots. That's why it's a clever trick.
I guess it would need permissions, but you can monitor the photo library with PHPhotoLibraryChangeObserver and check if a new item's subtype is photoScreenshot.
Otherwise userDidTakeScreenshotNotification only fires for your own app
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.
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).
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
Found in the HN commenting guidelines, linked at the bottom of most pages
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.
Hi! I think I’m on the same page (give or take a zoom level) now. That is hard to do between separate geodatabases (hence CRS, placenames, geocoding, etc.) but Google isn’t even doing it within their own. And the only way I can obtain a link is to first place a pin, which wants to snap to nearby features. If I try to link a nice trail near my home it snaps to the quarry instead, making me look like a maniac with a terrible idea of what a “quiet walk” looks like.
The other reason someone might want a screenshot specifically isn't to share a location, but to share a route. For instance, I might want to text a friend a screenshot of my driving route. Maps can sometimes route weirdly, so this is definitely a use-case I've needed before.
I have a seething hatred for google maps links people send on mobile because Google no longer shows you the map in your mobile browser. It has for at least a year or twoo required Google Maps be installed to show you what the person linked to.
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.
That seems oddly user hostile for apple. Especially for Wi-Fi passwords, which are a very common thing to share. Android has had a feature for years that generates the password as a plaintext-encoded QR code so you can share a wifi password without the other party even needing to type it in. And at least on my pixel 9, I have a toggle on the password entry field to toggle visibility.
I don't have an iOS device handy to compare against, but it surprises me that Apple wouldn't also recognize that Wi-Fi passwords in particular are extremely common things to share.
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.
I bet this is the inverse problem. Someone thought "oh a prescription is definitely privacy sensitive information, I should ensure the OS does the right thing" not realizing this counter productive behavior.
I thought your other comments about writing your own were sarcasm about how that's such a terrible situation if that's the kind of thing it would take.
But this one looks like you actually mean it? Yikes.
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.
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?
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.
In the case of sharing a link I have to remember/find where it is in each app, likely scroll through a long list of messaging (and for some reason non-messaging apps) to find the correct app, select the contact, and then pray that the link sent actually works for them and contains the correct information I'm seeing (very often the link will actually direct them to a web version of the app I'm using, then put a modal popup in front of the information asking them to use the app, then either send them to the app store, or send them to the app but strip out the actual information I linked and send them to a blank map).
Screenshots are clunky and unideal, but at least they're fast and I know that they don't fail or break or send the wrong info to my contact.
If it were a one off message, this wouldn't be an issue, but if you zoom out on the issue and see you're sending up to a hundred messages a day, points of failure become major life frictions and you're trained out of using things like links in messaging apps.
The ideal "World Wide Web" envisioned by it's original design, was that a URI was a durable pointer to an immutable piece of information.
In 2026, we now know that the information can be edited, or completely removed for many reasons, some legitimate, and some nefarious.
Taking a screenshot is the easiest way to ensure the original is kept for folks to see. Frankly, it'd be even better if (a) the app can signal to the OS information about the url to the page for the screenshot, (b) timestamps were captured in the image and not cropped, and (c) the OS can authenticate the screen shot and digitally sign that it came from an unaltered device.
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.
Yup, that's by design. They want to force you to "share" so they can both track who you interact with, and also try to convert the other person into a paying customer.
There should be a layer of user control where the user can make the OS lie to the app. The app has no need to know when a screenshot or recording is happening, what the real location is, what file system contents are, etc.
This is what made me avoid chrome since release, I tried to right click a youtube channel background as a teen wanting to use it as a template to make my own channel background on photoshop... turns out they had disabled it, while I could on firefox.
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
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.
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.
When iPhone shipped, any time you emailed a photo it would append "Sent from my iPhone" to try to virally market. Same or at least similar slimey tactics
This is an interesting case of "Good use" of a "bad feature". This feature is bad because it works against the user and device owner, but this use case like hiding your password when sharing your screen is a good use case.
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.
Marketing, like every other functional part of a business, requires technology and engineers. This has nothing to do with fear, you just don’t respect non-engineering work as critical to running a business.
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.
They aren't my indicators, but they read as sweat against the observable metrics being in decline. There is a perception that they want to pull on users outside of Bluesky that I don't really think exist, and I guess I share in that feeling when I believe the core still has so much basic parity missing with X et al that would demonstrate confidence in the current users you already have. Still interested to see what they ship as.
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
I'm confused why people are mad at Bluesky for this. Everyone stating their issues seems more related to Apple than Bluesky. So why point the finger at them?
I don’t think a significant percent of real Bluesky users actually care.
Having a follow button on the screenshot brings nothing and a logo is helpful when sharing (“hey it’s not twitter, I know it looks like it but it’s bluesky”) and looks subtle.
It’s just it’s a forum so people say things for discussions sake and get outraged by anything that a platform they don’t like is doing.
If not for the function being named "GrowthHack" I would have thought that hiding following status for screenshots to be a good privacy measure. They don't use it to hide anything else and since I'm not a user of the app I don't know if there is more extraneous information that could be used to infer or track down who screenshotted and they don't hide.
No because per default the input is not cleared when screenshotting. If you‘d implement this yourself for security reasons you'd most likely blur / overlay the whole screen when the app enters background state.
Probably, but to the extent that was at all a problem to begin with, multiply it by another 0.0001 or whatever for the threat of the screenshot being taken mid switch away!
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.)
Tangentially, I see a lot of people here upset that apps can react to your screenshot before it is captured. I think it is helpful to think about it as a tradeoff between freedoms:
(a) the freedom to screenshot any content on your own device
(b) the freedom to share content with others that cannot be screenshotted
It can be annoying when DRM or privacy features block a screenshot, but I think it can also benefit the platform ecosystem that you participate in as a user too. Idk!
If a type of lock was overwhelmingly used for bad reasons, and only worked when someone didn't cover their hands (analog pictures), I'd be arguing against that type of lock too.
Is it a “bad reason”? Millions of people chose to use Snapchat specifically because of how it handles screenshots. It is a feature even if you don’t like it.
Many people would find it inconvenient to find another device to take a picture with. And that manual picture would then have baked-in evidence that it was taken surreptitiously.
Locks keep honest people honest, as long as the app is up front about it and lets users make the choice, I don’t mind.
The best way to ask for this is to send an email, to the email address which you can find at the bottom of the page (click on "Contact"). There's no guarantee that the mods will find your comment otherwise.
Saying @dang has no effect; it does not activate a batsignal or any other mechanism of mod summoning. The only way to be sure a mod see this is to email them; see the contact link in the footer and include a link to the comment.
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.
Do you/should you (we) really expect that though? I regularly use color filters on my apple devices— grayscale to avoid distractions during the day and red tint at night. More recently I’ve been using the motion dots. I don’t know that I can say with confidence that I never want any of those “personal-perceptional-modifiers” to appear in a screenshot, but for most folks, I would guess it’s approximately never.
It’s so if an app is showing a password or bank account number or other piece of sensitive information it doesn’t accidentally end up in a screenshot. I think there are other places sensitive information won’t show.
Bluesky, and apparently others, are abusing the functionality for advertising purposes.
I think it’s a good thing it’s there. This functionality should be easy for apps.
I’d say this is one for app review or an App Store rule. But we all know those are a total joke.
Personally, I wish iOS didn't even facilitate this.
edit: to be clear, I don't think iOS should notify the app at all. The app could register areas as "invisible to screenshots" perhaps - I'm torn on that functionality.
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.
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.
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.
Android does it too: https://developer.android.com/about/versions/14/features/scr...
I dislike this hijacking for that reason and wish there was a way to turn it off.
So in this instance, am I right in understanding that iOS posts a notification after the user has completed a screenshot, which would make it impossible for the developer to use this notification to trigger anything that would modify that screenshot? Hence the developer’s work around?
Though I don’t see how this is anything like a keylogger.
If you screenshot what you are listening to, after the screenshot is taken spotify will open a full-screen popup to "share" the song you are listening to. This is quite dumb, especially since if you wanted to share a song via the screenshot, you can do so in the OS-level screenshot UI, and then you would close it and see Spotify's own similar version of the same UI. Spotify just really wants you to use their own share button so that they can track you.
I’m not sure why the app needs to be notified. There must be some use but I can’t think of it off the top of my head.
And that is reasonable, but it is also a surface where an app touches the OS, which should be a permission boundary that I can control. Allowing the option to opt-out of screenshot blocking with a proper double-confirm warning and biometric auth is also reasonable.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiapplicatio...
Yes, and I would say it's a bad thing that the OS tries to prevent this.
> 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.
I would say it's a bad thing that Bluesky makes the screenshot look different from what was on screen for the user. If I cared about excluding the "useless noise" from a faithful depiction of the pixels on my screen, I could address that myself.
As someone who develops apps for confidential conversations, making it harder for people to screenshot the confidential stuff is a feature the sending party wants, that is why they send in your app as opposed to others. It doesn’t make things impossible, just hard enough that 95% of people won’t bother to take a copy.
Same for example with disappearing audio messages on whatsapp
What I don’t like is the app being informed that I took a screenshot. The OS can hide things in screenshots without this.
pretty sure i was pointing out it is best not to think you are safe sending a message without considering the fact that people do these things.
RIP rational.
>To my knowledge, this is a misunderstanding.
re: an OS informing an app of a user action (but didn’t downvote ya)
> accidentally screenshotting your password manager;
I could not think of a more useless justification for installing malware into the OS. Okay, you've accidentally screenshotted your password manager. So what? Are you going to accidentally upload it to the internet too? I'd much rather live in a world where people who are that stupid face minor consequences for their actions than one in which all of our own computers are used against us.
That is what this article is about and why you should read it before commenting. The whole point is that it doesn't need to know you're taking screenshots. That's why it's a clever trick.
Isn’t that what everyone is talking about?
Otherwise userDidTakeScreenshotNotification only fires for your own app
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiapplicatio...
Found in the HN commenting guidelines, linked at the bottom of most pages
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
I don't have an iOS device handy to compare against, but it surprises me that Apple wouldn't also recognize that Wi-Fi passwords in particular are extremely common things to share.
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.)
Could write my own phone operating system to not be subject to the iOS WiFi password field display settings though!
Just like their iCloud Keychain API that lets apps secretly track users across app reinstalls and device resets.
Do you use the same password on every site? How do you deal with data breaches?
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.
But this one looks like you actually mean it? Yikes.
Oh wait it absolutely does.
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.
Screenshots allows you to get a point in time reference to what you are sharing.
Screenshots are clunky and unideal, but at least they're fast and I know that they don't fail or break or send the wrong info to my contact.
If it were a one off message, this wouldn't be an issue, but if you zoom out on the issue and see you're sending up to a hundred messages a day, points of failure become major life frictions and you're trained out of using things like links in messaging apps.
In 2026, we now know that the information can be edited, or completely removed for many reasons, some legitimate, and some nefarious.
Taking a screenshot is the easiest way to ensure the original is kept for folks to see. Frankly, it'd be even better if (a) the app can signal to the OS information about the url to the page for the screenshot, (b) timestamps were captured in the image and not cropped, and (c) the OS can authenticate the screen shot and digitally sign that it came from an unaltered device.
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.
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
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.
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.
That was the expectation of using the product so it fits and isn’t anything like this discussion.
Yellow.
They fuckin did it. Not construction not a warning of some type. Not yellow pages. Yellow - cool looking yellow.
Is what I said to myself as a 20-something product designer
When iPhone shipped, any time you emailed a photo it would append "Sent from my iPhone" to try to virally market. Same or at least similar slimey tactics
Sent from my Ryobi Riding Lawnmower
I agree this can be defined as cool and very very likely someone did this on their free time/prompted Claude on the side.
Their product UI kind of looks like X, so it's helpful to know the source of a post
Having a follow button on the screenshot brings nothing and a logo is helpful when sharing (“hey it’s not twitter, I know it looks like it but it’s bluesky”) and looks subtle.
It’s just it’s a forum so people say things for discussions sake and get outraged by anything that a platform they don’t like is doing.
I point not 1 but all 5 fingers at them.
With both hands so all 9 (I lost one in the Reddit Wars)
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?
(a) the freedom to screenshot any content on your own device (b) the freedom to share content with others that cannot be screenshotted
It can be annoying when DRM or privacy features block a screenshot, but I think it can also benefit the platform ecosystem that you participate in as a user too. Idk!
Many people would find it inconvenient to find another device to take a picture with. And that manual picture would then have baked-in evidence that it was taken surreptitiously.
Locks keep honest people honest, as long as the app is up front about it and lets users make the choice, I don’t mind.
Nobody deliberately opted in to random information hiding in a more general purpose app, or watermarking, or DRM.
https://github.com/mozzius/expo-privacy-sensitive/blob/main/...
He smokes them
You’d have to smoke that shit to come up with the decentralized/centralized fuckware that is Bluesky
Where anyone can say anything?
Maybe it’s so decentralized there is a dark web within BlueSky now! DarkSky
Now anyone can access the decentralized shadowhose from our server
Mothers Against Decentralized Development
He’s a madd mother, fucker
Quick! Everyone!
Over to blue sky where all the big stars in tech and VC and entertainment are feverishly sharing their thoughts and ambitions.
Only on blue sky will you find:
• knowhow
• gossip
• trends
• “ads that add” (Paul frazee thought of this one, the kid is a genius. He coded his own decentralized network on the blockchain)
Come on over to Blue Sky - all the stars are there. I mean here. On Bluesky where I am. Come on guys