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.
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.
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.
Bluesky has <100 employees so it could be possible
You're fun
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.
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.
Reddit as well. Although they let you disable it from what I remember.
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.
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.
[delayed]
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
This is arguably missing the "how" from the title -- can someone fix?
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.
@Dang: I would like to report an innocent victim to the automatic "How"-Removal.
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I think RevenueCat does the same thing. Smart way to exploit network effects!
X does the same thing.
Just since Nikita joined (altho now he's gone, doubt they will remove it tho)
has this guy lived on a rock? reddit/twitter/etc every social media platform does this already.
Example n+1 of why I only use web and not download an app
This is clearly bullshit. Fuck the fucking growth hacker bullshit mentality that thinks documents of reality are theirs to manipulate.
The screenshot should be an artifact of what's on the screen. It's really something how tech companies have stopped even nodding in the direction of ethics.
As Spring inevitably leads to Winter, and Night follows Day, Thus the Inevitable Enshittification of all Centralized Platforms
[dead]
> 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.
Today I noticed that Amazon Pharmacy decided to blank out my prescription info that I was screenshotting to send to my doctor. WTF.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.