Snaprecovery: Recover old Snaps that have “disappeared” from Snapchat
github.com
github.com
The other big players have been moving in that direction, making it less and less accessible and exportable, but Snap takes the cake.
Not so, TikTok actively lets you download videos in a convenient format. I think that helped it grow too, since they embed a watermark and add a splash screen at the end. Certainly that's how I first found out about the platform. That said, this seems to be disabled in some regions (not sure if you can opt in).
This feels like a bug, no? I don't see any logical reason for Snapchat to keep the files around that long.
Kind of a bummer I don't know of any method to mass clear cache data of all apps on my non-rooted Galaxy S8. It'd save a lot of space and was possible on ancient HTC phones with Android 2.3.5.
Edit: I experimented with wiping cache partition in recovery mode, but this ain't it - as the name suggests it's a separate partition.
I assume Insta invests in engineering for whatever cache expiration they do. And if there's 500MB cache, probably it's a conscious engineering decision.
But maybe the majority app developers, if they could fill up cache, probably aren't thinking that far ahead -- not thinking about that non-visual, non-customer-story aspects. So most wouldn't have occasion to learn how to do cache management sufficiently well that they don't cause stability or performance problems.
But hey, if the big names don't want to deal with it, more room for smaller teams.
I think there could be a real watershed moment in a few years as companies realize that rising to the technological challenge isn't actually that expensive or even difficult if you hire people with the right combination of arrogance and brains. Rage against the latrine.
No excuse I can think of for the media existing for more than a few minutes post-viewing.
edit: The Snapchat app, like the vast majority of applications, asks the OS to delete files. It very probably doesn't have any direct access to I/O.
That way anything one could recover from that device afterwards would be effectively random noise to them without the decryption key, regardless how the firmware of the device actually wrote the individual data blocks.
In ~2016 on Android, incoming messages that haven't been read yet weren't encrypted at all. You could just look at the app's SQLite database and find the message contents somewhere in the message table. The sending party would never known you had read it.