Bluesky’s Photo-Sharing App Flashes Now Available on App Store

Flashes, Bluesky’s new photo-sharing platform, released its 1.0.1 version on the App Store today. Flashes for Bluesky is free and available for download.

The new app is currently only available for Apple devices and operating systems. However, its developer, Sebastian Vogelsang, said in a recently published FAQ page, that they expect to expand the tool for Android and Web users in the future.

“Welcome to Flashes, a native photo and video-focused app for the Bluesky social network!,” states the description on the App Store. “Flashes makes it easy to share stunning photos and videos while keeping full compatibility with Bluesky’s open ecosystem.”

Last week, Flashes shared a public announcement on Bluesky saying that the app was almost ready—the beta version still needed fixes—and inviting users to pre-order and get the app as soon as it was ready and released. Nearly 10,000 users quickly registered to be among the first ones to try the app.

Here’s a little something to share again to get everyone to pre-register for the download of @flashes.blue ahead of tomorrow’s release: apps.apple.com/de/app/flash…

Don’t miss the drop!

[image or embed]

— Flashes App 🌩️ (@flashes.blue) February 24, 2025 at 12:54 PM

Now that the app is ready for download, Flashes has warned about a few issues. “When creating a new account make sure you don’t re-use an email you have used with any other Bluesky account yet,” states a post on Bluesky, explaining that the signup process won’t work with a reused email but a fix is in development. Users are advised to use unique email addresses or add suffixes to Gmail handles as a workaround.

Bluesky announced Flashes in January, as a strategy to support users looking for Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Facebook alternatives. The new image-focused app supports photos primarily but also short videos.

The platform currently supports up to 4 photos per post and 1-min videos, but the developer expects to support longer videos and more photos in the near future.

Flashes is built on Bluesky’s AT Protocol, which means that it automatically synchronizes with Bluesky. Every post shared on Flashes will also appear on Bluesky for now, part of the future plan is to run Flashes on its own network—but as part of the fediverse ecosystem.