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.
Is what he’s referring to. If they’re not using the feature in the intended way, it’s likely to break in the future. Though the consequences of it breaking are what, they don’t brand your screenshots?
The consequences could be anything, that’s the problem with unintended usage of features. Could be an ugly black box drawn on screen. Could be nothing. Could something subtle like the follow button doesn’t work anymore because the invisible logo now blocks tap events.