Actually, Snapchat does delete your photos. Just not straight away.

This was not the case on my device. I was able to recover all of the snaps I was ever sent, even after viewing them all. I found after looking at the Android code, there is a deleteVideoDirectory method, but no deleteImageDirectory method. There were some other discrepancies between the Video and Image deletion methods I am still looking into.

On the iPhone side, I was able to recover some recieved videos, and am looking at how to recover some sent videos stored in a SQLite Blob (seems to be the last 6 videos sent). I was not able to find any images on a non-jailbroken device.

I'm curious as to whether or not this recovery method works on an iPhone. On Android, if at least one snap is left unopened, every photo sent to you via the service is recoverable. That seems like a lazy implementation of the delete function.

Yeah I figured that out when it first came out, I just got the picture notification, saves the file in /data/, I then don't read the notification yet and copy the files out to my /sdcard

I'm sure it'd be easy to create an application to listen for the event and copy out the file for later "use".

I was assuming it was going to be a encrypted jpeg file on disk to make it a bit harder.

The Android bug is quite serious - it would be trivial for a kid with a rooted phone to send himself a chat, never open it and to occasionally copy the photos out. Choosing to persist them past the visual deletion is a curious mistake.

Off-topic, but can anyone name the file browser app he's using? It looks way nicer than the couple I've tried.