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Comment by realusername | Hacker News Reader

I also don't understand who thought it would be a good idea to disable screenshots...

Android is becoming worse every year.

For users, yeah there's no reason to disable screenshots or any other functionality that a user might want to do on their own hardware that they bought and morally should be in control of.

But for app developers there are a lot of reasons they might want to do that. Disappearing messaging apps like Snapchat, ticket QR code displaying apps, stock footage apps, ebooks, and more.

It's just that Google has decided that that second group of people actually owns your phone, not you.

This is why you need two smartphones, so you can use one to take a picture of the screen of the other... helps drive revenue for the industry.

This analogue loophole really makes me realize that if you need to stop a screenshot/screen recording for security/whatever, you've got a design problem. And this is specifically applicable to services like Netflix.

The technical background is that Android allows marking certain GUI surfaces as "sensitive", which increases their in-memory protection somewhat (not sure to what extent) and also makes them inaccessible to various remote screen recording/capturing solutions, including adb.

Not being able to take a screenshot is more of a side effect of that, but is arguably the main reason for most apps to use them in practice.

It's also been around for many years.

Banking apps?

That doesn't make any sense, how I'm suppose to do my personal budgeting?

And by the way you can screenshot in a browser.

It doesn't have to make any sense, banking "consultants" have put blocking screenshots in their "security requirements" and now all of them block screenshots.

You wouldn't want to risk being non-compliance when a breach happens would you?

Well its my phone my account why can't I take screenshots?

Literally something I regularly need to take screenshots of for payment confirmations etc.

I use my tablet for that, i.e. by taking pictures of the screen of my phone.

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