A look at iOS Bluesky apps

Mike Cohen
2 min readFeb 22, 2024

Around the middle of last year, I joined Bluesky when I got an invite and it became my favorite microblogging service, although I also use Mastodon & Threads. Bluesky felt a lot like “old” Twitter from before 2015 and it’s more fun & relaxed than the other services. It’s now open for everyone, but it still retains the same sense of fun.

There are 3 major Bluesky apps for iOS and each has some unique features, but none of them are perfect.

Bluesky apps for iOS. Only Skeets shows a badge.

The official app sets the standard, but it’s the most limited, lacking support for GIFs and hashtags. However, it’s the most reliable, and has the best threaded display of conversations.

Graysky is the oldest third party app, and the first to support GIFs and hashtags. It still has by far the best GIF support. They just recently added notifications, although like the official app it doesn’t show the icon badge.

Graysky’s GIF selector

Skeets is the only one that’s fully native, written in SwiftUI while the others are cross-platform React Native apps. It also has the best notifications and it’s the only one that shows the icon badge. However, a $1.99/month subscription is required for notifications. It has the best post composer, but the GIF…

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Mike Cohen

iOS developer, theater geek, history nerd. Former Bionic Panda. I love San Francisco.