The decentralized Twitter/X competitor Bluesky is recruiting to its staff by hiring one of the members of its developer community, software engineer Samuel Newman based in London. He developed the popular third-party Bluesky client Graysky and will continue helping develop the official Bluesky app alongside the rest of the front-end team.

It is difficult to tell what ultimately will become of the Graysky app, now that Kenton has abdicated. Newman says that, at least for now, he will "keep the app alive, 'maintained,' but in the short term only, as beyond that, "I won't add any ambitious new features. Instead, I will make sure that making the official app the best it can be takes its priority.".

However, he's also open to other developers who may be interested in acquiring the Graysky app, which might be a promising venture if Bluesky scales to become a sizable competitor to Twitter/X, Threads, and Mastodon. Bluesky now boasts 5.18 million registered users since publicly launching a month ago after a long private beta, with about half being actively posting on the platform.

What set Graysky apart was its vision: whereas one of the very first third-party apps for Bluesky and the first to actually address both iOS and Android users, it added to the best official default experience of Bluesky through including support for features the official client did not, such as GIFs, inline translation, an easy means of seeing everyone's likes, a feeds-first layout, and many more, including support for hashtags. Late last year, Graysky also added Trending Topics and a Pro subscription to help the app monetize. By the end of 2023, Graysky had topped 20,000 downloads and was working to add other features pretty Twitter-like, including drafts, bookmarks, muted words, polls, lists and more.

With Newman aboard in Bluesky, hopes run for official support to come for more features on official client. He said he "won't bring everything from Graysky to Bluesky" but will do his best to "port some of the good parts." Specifically, he expressed the desire to work on an iPad app.