Jack Dorsey’s Twitter competitor ‘Bluesky’ now available on the App Store, but you still need an invite

Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey left the company in May 2022 amid negotiations with Elon Musk. Since then, he has been working on Bluesky – a new decentralized social network that comes to compete with Twitter. This week, the Bluesky app was officially made available in the iOS App Store, but there’s a catch. It still requires an invitation to use it.

Bluesky is another Twitter competitor

As reported by TechCrunch, Bluesky is now available on the App Store for iPhone. But while anyone can download the app, users still need an invitation to join the new social network. “This app is available for download but you will need an invite code to create an account,” says the app description on the App Store webpage.

Bluesky’s official website still doesn’t show many details about the social network or its availability. The only thing users can do is enter their email address in a waiting list to get an invitation. But thanks to the App Store webpage, we now have an idea of what Bluesky looks like. Unsurprisingly, it’s essentially a simplified version of Twitter.

But under the hood, Bluesky is based on the AT protocol (originally called ADX, or Authenticated Transfer Protocol). AT is similar to ActivityPub, the decentralized protocol that powers Mastodon – another social network that’s quite similar to Twitter in some ways.

Ever since Twitter was acquired by Elon Musk, the company has been upsetting some users and developers with its arbitrary decisions. For example, Twitter banned third-party clients from using its API, which killed apps like Tweetbot and Twitterrific. The company has also been pushing paid features through the Twitter Blue subscription.

With this in mind, other social networks like Mastodon have been gaining more attention recently. This has even led the developer of Tweetbot to create a new client for Mastodon. Of course, it seems that Dorsey also wants to ride the wave of dissatisfied Twitter users to promote his new social network.

It remains unclear when exactly Bluesky will be made available to everyone, but the release of its app on the App Store suggests that this may happen very soon.