Facebook is allegedly working on a standalone camera app with live video streaming capabilities, pushing effort to get its 1.6 billion users into making and sharing more photos and videos.
The people behind the unnamed app is a team based in London. Just like Snapchat, the software automatically goes straight to the camera when it's opened, and as expected, it will have integrations with Instagram and any other apps under the Facebook umbrella.
A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment about the matter.
The Wall Street Journal brought the news to light, citing people familiar with the matter. The report also mentions that the app is simply a prototype and that there's a chance it won't go official at all.
Assuming that the details all hold true, this shows how determined Facebook is in penetrating and dominating the mobile photography and video capturing scene is. In other words, the social media company continues to trudge through, despite many repeated attempts that didn't pan out — to put it bluntly, it failed several times in releasing a successful camera app.
Back in 2012, Facebook Camera rolled out, and it was more or less an Instagram clone. On an interesting note, it was released just weeks after the company acquired Instagram. In the same year, Facebook Poke surfaced, and it was arguably the firm's first shot at making a Snapchat duplicate. These two are likely unfamiliar to most people, as they didn't exactly get that much fanfare to begin with.
On to 2014, Facebook launched Slingshot, yet another take on the Snapchat-like format. Even though it didn't require a Facebook account to use, it still couldn't appeal to enough users. Bolt is also another similar app that the Instagram concocted, but it never landed on U.S. shores when it couldn't garner popularity across New Zealand, Singapore and South Africa.
Going over 2015, the former Creative Labs team of Facebook created Riff, an app that let users remix videos and share them among friends.
Needless to say, none of these apps made it out alive. Facebook Poke went down back in 2014 and Slingshot, Bolt and Riff got pulled down in 2015.
Now, Facebook's latest attempt at another camera app in 2016 is by all means interesting to see, but based on the track record of the company, it would be best not to get too attached to it when it goes official.
