Comment by 3form
14 hours ago
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.
The app actually is notified after the screenshot is taken: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiapplicatio...
Android does it too: https://developer.android.com/about/versions/14/features/scr...
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> 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.
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"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.
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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
> This is the same technology that prevents you from accidentally screenshotting your password manager
I should be able to screenshot anything I want, including my password manager. I should be able to opt-out at the OS level, or any other level that enforces it. That's why it's definitely a user hostile feature.
Can Snapchat no longer inform the other user when a screenshot was taken?
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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.
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> 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.
But for completeness, iOS apps can detect screenshots. That’s what allows them to show annoying popups with a share option when you take a screenshot.
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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).
iOS does tell the app that a screenshot was taken though
> 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
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> 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. Geo URI is probably the closest we have today but I don't think much of anything outside the OS Geo community accepts it.
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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.
It's not about what you want. It's about increasing engagement with the Google platform
Today I noticed that Amazon Pharmacy decided to blank out my prescription info that I was screenshotting to send to my doctor. WTF.
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.
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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.
And if you take a screenshot of a product in the Amazon app it hijacks that and copies a link instead.
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.
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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.
Oh wait it absolutely does.
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.
Getting your account back on reinstall is good
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How else are they gonna track you? Think of the big tech
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.
> 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.
It should not exist as a control in the first place.
I know it may sound absolutist, but the way I see it: if you allow this as a user-revocable permission, then the very apps that need to be screenshotted by users most often will be the first to refuse to work at all unless you grant this permission.
Screenshotting is an system operations level feature. Apps should be neither aware of, nor able to interfere with, a screen capture being taken.
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.
users should have some way to control if screenshots have secret data in them or not, really. what if I do actually need to preserve it?
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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?
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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.
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!
> Many a time, a share button simply works
It works! Unless:
- the person you’re linking it to doesn’t have an account on that platform
- you’re posting it in a chat, and the site doesn’t implement unfurls correctly
- the site shows a thumbnail on the link, but clicking on it gets hijacked by the “mAkE an aCcOuNt/ login here” shenanigans.
- you’re trying to link to something in context and the sites linking doesn’t support it
- the site is riddled with ads.
- the site is slow to load.
- you’re trying to save something and don’t want to have to load the site every single time in order to refer to it.
- any combination of the above.
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.
I totally disagree - the few times I accidentally use a share button, or are forced to use one, the experience is so desperately miserable I am forcibly reminded why I never use them. It's always several clicks, choosing the social platform I need from the millions-long-list which is paginated into pages of like 4 icons at a time (I just want a URL! but you broke your website to force users into the app!) and from there choosing a specific chat or group or whatever from a poorly ordered list that starts with some person I met at a bar twelve years ago rather than the chat I was literally just typing in two seconds ago...
and then when it does send I have no control over the presentation on the other side. Sites love to add some cringe "I love this app SOOOO much hearteyesemoji fire fire fire... sent from my iPhone, made with love in san cupertino" nonsense in my own voice - literally sending their words into my chats using my account, as though I had written their marketing dreck
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
GrapheneOS doesn't allow for it. You'd need a rooted device to bypass screenshot blocking
Well damn, I would have thought rooting would have been a basic feature of GrapheneOS.
At least it's open source, so maybe one can add root access and screenshot blocking to it.
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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 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.
For Bluesky, sure. I think the comment was aimed at the trend.
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.
https://developer.android.com/security/fraud-prevention/acti...
In USA Wells Fargo blocks it, so I can't get a picture of the bugs I'm trying to report.
agree with you.
I hate the ChatGPT app and Spotify the most for their screenshot behavior.