How Bluesky and Threads Sneak Their Logos Into iOS Screenshots

Bluesky and Threads both employ a similar tactic when you capture a screenshot on iOS of an individual tweet. Instead of showing the "Follow" button in their user interface, they replace it with their own logo. Tim Marinin discovered this in the Bluesky app and decided to investigate further. The source code for the app is publicly available, which helped him understand the mechanism behind it.

This mechanism was introduced in January 2026 by a developer named mozzius in a file named GrowthHack.tsx. However, the real key to understanding the process lies in the package expo-privacy-sensitive, also created by mozzius. This package generates a UITextField with the isSecureTextEntry property set to true, which renders the button content into that field's .layer.

When you screenshot it, iOS hides this UITextField by blanking the layer, allowing the Bluesky logo to remain visible. For other platforms, the content is rendered as-is, without masking. Tim Marinin finds it clever but considers it deceptive. He argues that screenshots should be a pure representation of what is displayed on the screen, just like a photograph taken with a camera.

He compares this practice to apps that add extra text to the clipboard when you copy and paste, such as Apple Books, which appends quotation marks and attribution lines to copied text. While you can delete the unnecessary lines in Books, with Bluesky and Threads, there's no way to capture a screenshot that accurately reflects what you see in the app.