Detection over blocking
Screenshots of social content aren't blocked on boopr. They succeed, and the person whose content was captured finds out. That's deliberate: blocking captures is unreliable across phones, and on some it would quietly cancel the screenshot in a way that breaks the alert itself. An alert changes behavior the social way instead.
It all runs on the device, on top of the same encryption that keeps us from reading your content. boopr's servers never see what was captured; they only pass an encrypted note between two friends saying that a capture happened.
What triggers an alert
- Screenshot a boop, and its sender is alerted.
- Screenshot a post or its comments, and the post's author is alerted.
- Screenshot a profile, and the profile's owner is alerted.
- Screenshot the feed, and the alert goes to the author of the post at the top of your screen.
Alerts only travel between friends, and inside the app they always carry a name. Screens that are yours alone, like your own profile or your recovery phrase, alert nobody; some of them just warn you on the spot instead.
What each side sees
If you take the screenshot: nothing appears on your screen. No flash, no warning, no "they've been notified". Screenshotting a boop gives a small vibration; that's it.
If it's your content: you get a push that deliberately names nobody, "Someone screenshotted your content", so no detail sits on your lock screen. The full story lives in the app: the side menu's "Screenshots" section shows who, what, and when, like "[Name] took a screenshot of your post".
Timing: usually within seconds. If the phone that took the screenshot is offline, the report is saved and delivered when it reconnects. Two screenshots in quick succession count as one alert.
Screen recording
Recording the screen triggers the same alert, marked as a recording: "[Name] recorded your post". On iPhone this also covers mirroring the screen to another display. One honest limit: Android can only detect screen recording on recent versions (Android 15 and newer); older Androids can't.
What's blocked outright
- On Android, boopr blanks a few truly sensitive screens of your own: your recovery phrase, your transfer QR code, and your own profile view. A screenshot there comes out blank.
- Posts, profiles, and boops are deliberately not blanked on Android. On many phones, blocking would cancel the screenshot before boopr could notice it, and the alert would never fire. Detection needs the capture to succeed.
- iPhones don't let any app block screenshots, on any screen. boopr says so right where it matters, on the recovery phrase screen: "This phone can't block screenshots here". What iOS does get: sensitive content is hidden in the app switcher.
The honest limits
This is a deterrent, not a force field. For the alert to be worth trusting, you should know exactly where its edges are:
- A second phone pointed at the screen is invisible to every app ever made.
- On Android 13 and older, detection needs photo access turned on for boopr. The app asks for it and only checks that a screenshot happened; it never opens or uploads photos. If a friend declined it, screenshots on that phone go unnoticed.
- Android 14 and older can't detect screen recording.
- If the screenshotter's phone stays offline for more than a day afterward, the alert can be lost.
- Only the surfaces listed above are watched. Screenshotting, say, a friends list alerts nobody.
Share accordingly. The alert makes screenshots visible; it can't make them impossible. If something must never be captured, the only real protection is not sharing it in the first place.
Your settings
"Screenshot Alerts" lives in Settings › Notification Settings. Turning it off mutes only the push banner; the events still land, with names, in your Screenshots list inside the app.
It doesn't stop your own screenshots from being reported to friends. That part isn't a setting, because whether your friends find out isn't yours to decide.
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