Same here. Sadly I think the voices like ours won't be heard, though, because Apple's looking for someone who's going to buy in on the whole ecosystem, and I think we're not it. Or at least I'm not.
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.
This prevents us from taking scrolling screenshots (a native feature in many smartphones today that is often useful when there is more than one screen of content).
I dislike this hijacking for that reason and wish there was a way to turn it off.
If you screenshot what you are listening to, after the screenshot is taken spotify will open a full-screen popup to "share" the song you are listening to. This is quite dumb, especially since if you wanted to share a song via the screenshot, you can do so in the OS-level screenshot UI, and then you would close it and see Spotify's own similar version of the same UI. Spotify just really wants you to use their own share button so that they can track you.
I’ve seen another app do that but for a different reason. It’s for security cameras and they use it to show a “hey idiot just press the save a picture button, don’t take screenshots” popup, which is also hostile.
I’m not sure why the app needs to be notified. There must be some use but I can’t think of it off the top of my head.
Anyone can take a "snap" of the phone screen with another phone's camera so this is a losing battle anyway.
It amuses me that browsers in incognito mode refuse to allow screenshots on mobile. But same browser running incognito on a desktop can be merrily screenshotted. What is the difference they are trying to enforce based purely on device form factor/OS.
> I’m not sure why the app needs to be notified. There must be some use but I can’t think of it off the top of my head.
My pet theory: it's because Snapchat got big early, platforms added the feature to facilitate Snapchat's business model, and then banks started abusing it, and it stuck around "because sekhurity".
Very interesting!
Parent poster is correct, that notification does feel akin to a key logger… although I’m not sure that it applies to this bluesky feature.
So in this instance, am I right in understanding that iOS posts a notification after the user has completed a screenshot, which would make it impossible for the developer to use this notification to trigger anything that would modify that screenshot? Hence the developer’s work around?
"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.
The OS notifies the app after the screenshot is taken. The app doesn’t get to do anything in response to it being taken or allow it to be blocked.
They’re abusing an iOS text rendering control function handled by the OS. Before the screenshot is taken iOS swapped out the rendered text for “sensitive” fields and images that.
The replacement is supposed to be something like a masked account number, password asterisks, or just general blur.
> 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.
As someone who develops apps for confidential conversations, making it harder for people to screenshot the confidential stuff is a feature the sending party wants, that is why they send in your app as opposed to others. It doesn’t make things impossible, just hard enough that 95% of people won’t bother to take a copy.
Same for example with disappearing audio messages on whatsapp
What I don’t like is the app being informed that I took a screenshot. The OS can hide things in screenshots without this.
One user wants it not to be shared, but the other user might have various reasons to want to take that screenshot - maybe it's evidence of something they need to share urgently with others, whatever. It's definitely hostile to that other user. I get why you'd set it up that way, but it's a tension that really goes against the "full control of your own device" ideal a lot of people have.
It's mostly dumb because of obvious analog loop holes. I at minimum carry 4 devices with cameras, often as many as 12. If I want to capture the disappearing message... I will do it; making it annoying just makes me pissed at the developer + the is.
Don't send me anything you don't want screenshotted. Easy-peasy. I'll accept an opt-out of whatever protections are in place for the general user, but I don't accept that those protections should remain in place for all users. It's hostile.
> Yes, and I would say it's a bad thing that the OS tries to prevent this.
Another way to look at it is the OS makes certain guarantees to the developer around security. Giving control of this to the user would erode that guarantee from the OS to the developer. The result of that is that some developers would simply never display some information (e.g. due to their own contracts or reasonable concerns about fraud/abuse/etc.).
Very similar to the video pipelines in modern devices. Prior to video pipelines which the OS could attest could not be hijacked by the user, many content providers simply would not allow e.g. Netflix to release their content on certain platforms. That the OS does provide such an attestation option for developers allows uses that otherwise would not exist.
The user should be the ultimate authority of what their computers do, not the app developer. It's my phone, not the app developer's phone. If my phone has a "screenshot" function, I expect to be able to invoke it whenever I want, not whenever some app developer deems it OK.
I hear your perspective. I am not particularly advocating either position. I am just pointing out that the alternative may be fewer apps available on one's favorite platform. Everything is tradeoffs, and fortunately one can always boot into an OS that will screenshot how you want.
Incorrect. There's a log written about this on the Internet. Suffice to say that Netflix did not allow all of their titles to be viewed on all browsers for years after it was technically feasible.
You are right, I remembered wrong. Netflix degraded the quality for me for years, according to them because of lack of DRM. It was because of lack of hardware DRM.
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.
the other device then likely indexes it after a brief once-over by its own ai-enabled os. any crossover interactions, and it may as well be the same device. maybe some of you have not experimented enough with the theshold to have noticed yet.
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.
As with most things, it would be ideal if we could have both good defaults to make things accessible and advanced user controls to allow users to retain control.
That’s a rare mix these days.
People like to say that. How many hundreds of additional options would a modern phone OS need to provide that though? How could applications possibly be tested?
You could have a million installs and 300,000 of them could easily have fully unique combinations of options past what’s available today.
How could you ever provide support to a user? “First take 200 screenshots and send those to me…”
> 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.
I guess it would need permissions, but you can monitor the photo library with PHPhotoLibraryChangeObserver and check if a new item's subtype is photoScreenshot.
Otherwise userDidTakeScreenshotNotification only fires for your own app
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).
> 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
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.
I think that's actually a separate issue. What I specifically want from a Google Maps share URL is for it to be something I can send over text that will reproduce for my recipient exactly what I see.
A lat/lon/zoom/start?/dest? is kind of what a Google Maps share currently is, but it's neither an interoperable standard nor a reliable capture of the current state, so really the worst of both worlds.
Hi! I think I’m on the same page (give or take a zoom level) now. That is hard to do between separate geodatabases (hence CRS, placenames, geocoding, etc.) but Google isn’t even doing it within their own. And the only way I can obtain a link is to first place a pin, which wants to snap to nearby features. If I try to link a nice trail near my home it snaps to the quarry instead, making me look like a maniac with a terrible idea of what a “quiet walk” looks like.
I've noticed similar things with off-road biking as well. Hydrocut generally does an okay job of snapping to the trails there since Google knows about them, but I was at Rondeau this weekend, and Google kept insisting I was on the adjacent Lakeshore Rd rather than the Harrison trail [1] that I was actually on. And this had real consequences because my youngest and I had become separated from the rest of our group and were trying to use a "share my location" through Signal, but the Android system-supplied location used was the one that had been unhelpfully snapped to the road.
The other reason someone might want a screenshot specifically isn't to share a location, but to share a route. For instance, I might want to text a friend a screenshot of my driving route. Maps can sometimes route weirdly, so this is definitely a use-case I've needed before.
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.
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.
That seems oddly user hostile for apple. Especially for Wi-Fi passwords, which are a very common thing to share. Android has had a feature for years that generates the password as a plaintext-encoded QR code so you can share a wifi password without the other party even needing to type it in. And at least on my pixel 9, I have a toggle on the password entry field to toggle visibility.
I don't have an iOS device handy to compare against, but it surprises me that Apple wouldn't also recognize that Wi-Fi passwords in particular are extremely common things to share.
Unsecure: open Shortcuts, tap Gallery, search “Adjust Clipboard”. Add to Action Button folder and run from Action Button. - Or add “Dismiss Siri and Continue” action after “Get Clipboard” so you can say “Siri, Adjust Clipboard”.
Type in the still-unreasonably small window, tap Done, paste password. (Then clear clipboard I suppose and consider privacy implication if your clipboard syncs to Mac.)
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.
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.
Yeah, health information is interesting in general because it needs to be kept strictly secret from unauthorized people, but people also often need or want to share their own information and have every legal and moral right to do so.
I thought your other comments about writing your own were sarcasm about how that's such a terrible situation if that's the kind of thing it would take.
But this one looks like you actually mean it? Yikes.
Major reason I don't use password managers that much.
> Do you use the same password on every site?
I use a password I can reconstruct in memory for sites I care about logging in by hand. If I don't, or don't mind resetting my password each time, I just use random garbage + whatever platform password manager is the one active today, with vague hopes that it'll still be there the next time I need to log in.
> How do you deal with data breaches?
Who ever cares about those? I'm yet to hear about anything impactful being released on those. It only matters if you actually do reuse the same e-mail/login and password combinations on both important sites and garbage sites. Which is something you should not. But 2FA and magic links tend to solve that vendor-side, these days.
I use KeepassXC and Syncthing. It's not a single password manager doing both the managing and syncing, but it works very well, and I sync between phone/laptop/desktop without any third parties.
Keepass database is an openly documented format, and there are several apps available on iOS that use it and can store the database in your iCloud (ie syncthing is not required, unless you need to sync to non-iOS devices)
Just search for keepass in the app store (Keepassium, KeePass Touch, Strongbox, ...)
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
Correction: GrapheneOS is concerned with their so called "Android security model" more than anything else, and where that security model gives guarantees to app developers and service providers that harms the user's security, they merrily side with the developer's security against the user, at best give some more or less questionable reasons why that unfortunately currently cannot be changed, and at worst insult you for suggesting anything else.
Potentially. The existence of the law exemplifies the idea the law is there to protect someone; all you need then to upgrade it is to argue that the current method is insufficient protection. Spirit of the law has been established - letter of the law will follow.
>I think he picked up my "gaming is dead now" outlook since he doesn't really have any interest in new systems or games anymore
This is interesting, as I was about to say that gaming has never been more alive than it is now - but it's true that at least the developments in hardware are not nearly as exciting as they used to be in the past. Maybe that's what he's feeling?
The hardware thing is a yes and no type of deal. Yes next gen hardware is largely boring but retro gaming hardware is amazing right now. I recently acquired a r36s which is an amazing system and apparently can also run things like Undertale or Stardew valley (yet to try out this part). I'm having a blast playing the Pokemon games.
It's true that open handhelds are where it's at right now. Steam Deck is also just simply a wonderful thing. Yet I know it's just somehow not the same as it's been before; architecturally, there's less innovation, just more of doing the "obvious right thing" here, and the big players, especially PS and Xbox are just sad attempts at dumbing down PCs to keep their walled gardens. So, nice things are still there, it's sadly just not as exciting.
But I'd say it's a subtype of the Dunning-Krueger effect rather than part of the general definition.
Personally I've always thought of Dunning-Krueger as an extension of the first definition here. Newbies/amateurs overestimating their skills and experts underestimating them, though I feel like the second definition is probably more true of human behaviour.
For those interested, it’s not just in Apology this comes up. In Theaetetus he does a pretty good job disproving that it is even possible to know what knowledge is.
I think the third one is a separate thing. I don’t know of a name for it, but I’d call it the engineer’s (or physicist’s) blindspot or something like that.
I can’t remember of DK suggests some sort of effect where the expert has undue self-doubt, though…
> I can’t remember of DK suggests some sort of effect where the expert has undue self-doubt, though…
There is a brief bit where they attribute that observation to other causes:
In making these predictions, we felt that we could account for an
anomaly that appeared in all three previous studies: Despite the
fact that top-quartile participants were far more calibrated than
were their less skilled counterparts, they tended to underestimate
their performance relative to their peers. We felt that this miscalibration had a different source then the miscalibration evidenced by
bottom-quartile participants. That is, top-quartile participants did
not underestimate themselves because they were wrong about their
own performances, but rather because they were wrong about the
performances of their peers. In essence, we believe they fell prey
to the false-consensus effect (Ross, Greene, & House, 1977). In the
absence of data to the contrary, they mistakenly assumed that their
peers would tend provide the same (correct) answers as they
themselves—an impression that could be immediately corrected
by showing them the performances of their peers. By examining
the extent to which competent individuals revised their ability
estimates after grading the tests of their less competent peers, we
could put this false-consensus interpretation to a test.
My experience has been that this isn't limited to engineers. I'm sure most people here have had people from other departments tell them how they need to do their jobs in one way or another.
For example, there are always at least a few people who you have to consult regularly because their tickets are always written how they perceive a problem should be solved rather than explaining the underlying problem to be solved. Then there are the sales and marketing types who like to dictate how the UX of the front-end should be because they like to retell anecdotes to prospective clients about how they solved a problem. Then there's the guy who hands you a spreadsheet he's maintained for years and tells you he wants you to put something exactly like it in the flagship product as a new feature.
>My experience has been that this isn't limited to engineers.
To some extent, but the most severe form does seem fairly unique to engineers, specifically programmers. That is, I've met many arrogant lawyers and doctors, but never a lawyer or doctor who assumes they could program a computer due to their legal or medical expertise. But I've seen many a programmer assume that because they are proficient in programming they can confidently and authoritatively expound on all other areas of human endeavor (those being obviously inferior and trivial in the face of their own).
I'd say celebrities and creatives in general are often big offenders here too. Lots of actors/athletes/musicians acting like being good at what they do means they're also qualified to talk about science and engineering. And a lot of reviewers, documentary creators and specialist writers that decide to wade into discussions about topics they have no knowledge of/cover something they're new to, only to look ridiculously out of touch as a result.
See the Nostalgia Critic review of the Wall. Or the Alex Meyers review of Obsession.
There's also the idea on the other side of the coin - whereby experts on a topic underestimate how much they know about it compared to the average person.
Sorry, I'm confused. My formulation "experts on a topic underestimate how much they know about it compared to the average person" and your "topic experts overestimate how much the average person knows about it" seem semantically identical to me, just from a different side of the relation. What nuance did I miss?
In fact it was often mentioned as a recommended way to try to invest in SpaceX via proxy, before IPO. I don't think that advice had much merit, but it was there nevertheless.
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