Butterfly Lets You Use Bluesky With Apple Watch
With Bluesky’s growing popularity among X-pats , it was only a matter of time before the social networking service started to have interesting clients . The latest to join the party is Butterfly , an Apple Watch app for Bluesky. It allows you to view your feed, post, and send direct messages to other users. The highlight is the beautiful design of the app, making it worth trying.
Butterfly setup
As always, I highly recommend that you create an app password for Butterfly. You can easily use your Bluesky password to log into Butterfly instead, but using app passwords is more secure. Start by going to Bluesky’s app passwords page ( Settings > Privacy & Security > App Passwords ). During the initial setup of Butterfly, you will be required to enter your Bluesky handle and password (or app password). For security reasons, you can’t insert an app password into your Apple Watch, which means you’ll have to enter it manually. Other than this glitch, the installation was painless.
You can also use multiple accounts with Butterfly: Once you’re logged in, click the three-line button in the top right corner and select Accounts , then Add Account .
Using Bluesky with Apple Watch
Since it’s an Apple Watch app, I mostly only use Butterfly for quickly scrolling through my feed and checking my private messages, but it’s a surprisingly useful app for other purposes as well. When you open Butterfly, you’ll see a timeline that you can scroll through using the Apple Watch’s digital crown. It feels very natural for a watch, and I turn to Butterfly whenever I want to quickly skim through a Bluesky feed. It’s also cut down on the amount of time I spend on the Bluesky iPhone app, where I tend to read more messages than I’d like. This is an unexpected side effect of using the Apple Watch app, but a pleasant one.
Butterfly also allows you to post and send private messages, but these are paid features. You can unlock them by paying a one-time fee of $2.99. Buttons for accessing private messages and posting messages are located in the lower left and lower right corners of the screen, respectively. My biggest problem was pressing these buttons regularly because they are tiny. Instead, I often click on a post or video. I eventually discovered a way to press them regularly: press the corner of the watch screen instead of trying to press the button itself.
The best way to post through Butterfly is to use your iPhone’s keyboard. You can also select photos and add them to your messages, but Apple Watch can only display a limited number of photos, and they may not always be your most recent ones. Typing on iPhone is straightforward, but the Apple Watch display sometimes turns off, and in such cases, strange things can happen to your messages. In my case, I typed three sentences, but the first one was erased when I hit the publish button. It’s not Butterfly’s fault, but you should know that some restrictions cannot be bypassed.
Butterfly’s strength is that it displays your feeds and allows you to quickly like or repost. You can swipe left to access more of your channels, and the app does a great job of displaying them. Each message is followed by several buttons that allow you to like, repost, reply or report, and block your account. I had a lot of fun browsing through the various posts, especially the cat photos (which even look great on my Apple Watch).
That being said, my biggest complaint is that the app cuts off messages after a certain number of characters and there is no way to read the entire message. I also encountered a bug that caused the app to display an error message whenever I tried to view my notifications, and I hope the developer can fix these issues.