posted in Technology
How Bluesky draws its logo on screenshots
timmarinin.net/2026/bluesky-screenshots/This is exploiting an edge case behaviour of a security feature. At a programming level, this is bad code, and will break at some point, possibly in an ugly way. I also don’t like the idea of apps being sneaky and hiding behaviour from users.
I use Voyager, and there’s a button “share as screenshot / image”, which allows you to include a watermark, and shows you exactly what the end result will look like. Just do something like that instead?
It’s not bad code, it’s just code you don’t like. Unless there is a major overhaul with the security package they are using, that could cause issues, but that’s not likely going to happen because huge security changes mean legitimate implementations break as well. As for hiding it from users, this is an open source app. The code is literally available for anyone to view. If someone is unable to parse it out, that’s on them.
Did you actually look at how it’s implemented in the linked GitHub thread?
How it works is it takes the child view, and stuffs it into the password field. iOS automatically hides the password content (the dots) in screenshots, so by stuffing the view into there it gets hidden in screenshots. I then added the logo, and absolutely positioned the follow button on top of it. when the button is hidden, the watermark is revealed!
Absolute positioning layering hacks based on a quirk of how iOS currently handles child nodes of password fields when the dots would push content out of the parent node in screenshots. The filename of this feature is literally called “growth-hack”. I dunno what else to tell you man, but if you like it, I’m happy for you. But it’s clearly bad code.
As for the second part of your comment; normal users don’t look at source code. That argument means nothing in this context.