Snapchat adds free phone number verification to its list of SDK perks
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
This is a truly hilarious---nay... ridiculous--way of describing "our login sdk also handles stuff like phone number verification".
Everyone I know that uses Snapchat has migrated to TikTok, but I personally have limited insight into these dynamics. From my perspective, even though the sharing dynamics are different, TikTok seems to capture and hold much greater attention.
With TikTok, you're publishing to the world; with Snapchat you're publishing to your world.
Private secondary Instagram accounts (finstas) for smaller circles and Instagram's "share only to 'close friends'" features are taking a lot of that Snapchat market over.
TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook are all places where people share more public / curated content, whether that's a silly video you made, a meme, or a little more curated photo of something exciting you're doing. Regardless of the content, there's a big focus on reputation and superficial interactions (likes, comments, etc.)
In contrast, Snapchat is still extremely popular for private communication (group chats, private messaging). For many college-age people, Snapchat is closer to an alternative to text messaging -- people heavily use the editing and multimedia features in creative ways that you couldn't do with normal SMS (For example, drawing over an image, circling something, overlaying another image, typing out a sentence over an image). Snapchat still has a consistent user base here because they've continually focused on improving the chat features. One example of this phenomenon: Whenever I met new people in college, we exchanged 1) Phone numbers 2) Snapchat accounts, since those are the primary methods for private communication for many. My snapchat friends list is nearly 1:1 with my phone contact book for anyone I met socially.
Instagram competes with Snapchat (and is arguably winning) on any feature that focuses on public sharing, such as the "stories" feature -- And for good reason, since Instagram as a platform has been designed from the start around public sharing. Similarly, TikTok will definitely beat Snapchat on the curated public video content, because that's just never what Snapchat was good at.
Only time will tell whether the smaller user base that is hyper-loyal to Snapchat for private messaging is large enough to justify their insane valuation, but I don't think Instagram or TikTok have really captured Snapchat's core value in private messaging.
Personally I wouldn't touch that company even with a barge pole. Their business model is no different than the big players, except their ads seem to be even more noxious than those peddled by the big players. Google & Facebook have a wide range of ads, both good products as well as trash, while Snapchat seems to be very focused on trashy clickbait with little valuable content.
Their privacy situation is also a major problem and is not GDPR compliant (not saying the others are, but that still doesn't excuse them with breaking EU regulations).
They are extremely hostile to third-party developers with significant obfuscation efforts around their private API. They are very likely to "pull a Twitter" when it comes to restricting access to their currently open APIs and leave developers stranded. Twitter also used to be very friendly towards developers, before abruptly shutting down most of their APIs and rendering products built on them completely useless (or neutered beyond any significant value), sometimes destroying entire business built around their platform.
Their lunch is also being eaten by Instagram, which puts them in a risky position with regards to profitability and increases the likelihood of them doing something nasty to try turn the ship around at the expense of developers who committed to the platform.
>their ads seem to be even more noxious
I don't think I've ever seen an ad in Snapchat. It's all buried in the Discover page that nobody uses anyway. As opposed to, ahem, Insta which injects an ad into every story you view.
>They are extremely hostile to third-party developers with significant obfuscation efforts around their private API.
That's kinda, you know, the entire point of their app. It's all geared around ensuring the user's privacy -- ensuring snaps are ephemeral, not stealthily recorded or captured. Of course they're jumping through hoops to defend their private API.
>a risky position with regards to profitability
Is it? https://otp.tools.investis.com/clients/us/snap_inc/SEC/sec-s...
But isn’t that a bit of a problem when it comes to ads where you want people to see them if you want to get paid? So they’re bound to increase their ad intrusiveness at some point and with the quality of ads in there I’m not sure people will put up with it.
> It's all geared around ensuring the user's privacy
Security by obscurity doesn’t really work though, it’s always going to be a game of cat & mouse and leaks are bound to happen. On the other hand, their current approach of obfuscation prevents a lot of valid & non-malicious use-cases like desktop clients, scheduled posts, etc.
> Is it?
Instagram still seems to be crushing them when it comes to active users, plus Facebook has the ability to run it at a loss for an insane amount of time if they wanted to, letting the competition (such as Snap) starve to death.
Obscurity is a completely cromulent, and actually decently effective (as clearly evidenced by Snap), stage to a defense in depth architecture.
Because of this, that's why there's no bots on Snapchat for a long time (yet). Bots have proliferated all over TikTok, Instagram and Twitter since they became mainstream and still to this day.
Snap already has official SDKs for third-party developers for years that allow you to deal with login which they control that allows them to expand out into other apps, for example.