Earlier this year, social network Bluesky updated its app to version 1.114 with two key features: LIVE badges, allowing users to signal when they’re livestreaming on Twitch, and cashtags, specialised hashtags for discussions about publicly traded stocks. Following the controversies on rival platform X, there has been a significant increase in the number of users, coinciding with these updates.
Bluesky may be able to profit from a recent surge in new installs that have surged in the days following the widespread dissemination of the X deepfake news thanks to the new features.
Users of X were requesting that its built-in AI bot Grok sexualise actual women’s and occasionally children’s photos without their permission. The dissemination of “non-consensual sexually explicit material” prompted the California attorney general to launch an investigation into xAI’s chatbot this week.
Bluesky saw an increase in downloads in the United States following the scandal. New data from Appfigures, a market intelligence firm, shows that daily downloads of Bluesky’s iOS app had increased by almost 50% compared to the time before the deepfakes became widely known.
According to the company, Bluesky normally receives about 4,000 installs in the United States every day. However, between December 30, 2025, and January 6, 2026, there were about 19,500 iOS downloads of Bluesky in the United States. Downloads increased by 49% to 29,000 between January 7 and January 14, 2026.
Cashtags, on the other hand, will enable the app to catch up to one of X’s more common use cases: talking about stocks. A dollar symbol is placed before the stock ticker symbol (for example, $AAPL for Apple) to form a cashtag.
Before Twitter implemented cashtags in 2012, the concept was initially presented by the stock-focused social network Stocktwits, which currently boasts over 10 million users.
The “Live Now” experimental feature, which allows users to temporarily add a “LIVE” label to their avatar to signify when they’re broadcasting online, is also being made more widely available, according to Bluesky. As of right now, nobody can go live directly on Bluesky; this capability only works with Twitch.
Following drops in downloads and usage on the network last year, Bluesky has seen an increase in activity. The social networking startup’s downloads fell to all-time lows in April 2025, according to Appfigures, and by the end of October, the average daily users on mobile devices had decreased by about 40%, according to Similarweb data. Many influencers now have Bluesky profiles, although they still often post more frequently on X, according to the Pew Research research from last year.
This implies that transferring from one real-time social network to another comes with a bigger cost than some might anticipate. Bluesky’s battle will involve more than just adding new features; it will also need to figure out how to persuade consumers to abandon years of deeply rooted habits.
More details of the new feature
Cashtags: Users can now make clickable links that gather postings about particular publicly traded firms by placing a dollar sign ($) before a ticker symbol (such as $AAPL). To cater to stock market fans, this incorporates a long-standing feature from “old Twitter” and Stocktwits.
LIVE Badges: All users can now access the experimental “Live Now” function. When a person is live-streaming on Twitch, it temporarily adds a badge to their avatar.
External Linking: Bluesky does not presently allow native live broadcasting; clicking the badge takes visitors to the external Twitch feed.
Platform Support: Bluesky has stated that support for additional streaming platforms may be introduced in the future, while it is presently restricted to Twitch.
The growth impacted the Install Surge, in which Bluesky’s iOS app had an almost 50% increase in daily downloads in the United States following the deepfake controversy on X in late 2025 and early 2026. The download statistics between December 30, 2025, and January 6, 2026, show daily installs increased from a baseline of around 4,000 to about 19,500, and by mid-January 2026, they had reached 29,000.
The update has strategically positioned the social media app as a competitor to X’s past practice of deprioritising external links; Bluesky’s leadership emphasised a commitment to making external connecting simple.
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