Bluesky, Jack Dorsey's Decentralized Twitter Rival, Launches An Android App

By Stephen Graves

Bluesky, the decentralized Twitter alternative backed by the social media platform's former CEO Jack Dorsey, has launched an Android app.

The platform's launch on Android follows the release of an app on Apple's iOS in March. Bluesky is also available for desktop users in a testing environment at staging.bsky.app.

For the time being, Bluesky is restricted to users who've joined through a waitlist, or who've received an invite code from an existing user. The platform currently has around 25,000 users, with some prominent crypto figures such as NFT collector Cozomo de' Medici among those who've signed up for the platform (Decrypt is among those early adopters, and can be found at @decryptmedia.bsky.app).

What is Bluesky?

In 2019, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey announced the formation of a working group within the company to research and create a decentralized social media protocol.

Following Dorsey's departure from Twitter, the Bluesky initiative announced the launch of the AT Protocol in October 2022, together with a roadmap for the project. In the wake of Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, the Bluesky group confirmed that it's independent of the social media site, and has been a public benefit limited liability company since February.

Although it's headed up by Jay Graber, a former developer for privacy coin project Zcash, Bluesky's AT Protocol takes a "blockchain optional and blockchain agnostic" approach, according to Graber.

In an October 2022 tweet, Bluesky stated that its team, who have worked on decentralized web protocols and blockchain networks, is "working on synthesizing the best of what we’ve seen into something new."

Bluesky employs a federated model, in which users can move their profiles between different social media platforms that use the AT Protocol. "Users will also be able to control the algorithms that determine what content is served to them," the Bluesky team wrote in an October 2022 blog post. "We must have control over our algorithms if we're going to trust in our online spaces."

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