Snapchat is rolling out cool new features for those who love to use the platform for personal conversations. Now, you can text and make video calls inside the app.
In an interview with The New York Times, one of the founders of the company explains the reason behind the recent changes in the app.
"The goal has always been to move beyond messaging," says Evan Spiegel. "We're trying to take the traditional text conversation and make it better."
So has it become better? Here's what we've gathered so far from collated reviews.
Previously, the app only allows 45-character messages to individual snaps. With the new instant messaging feature, users can now have a complete conversation with no word or character count limitation. However, a user can only start text exchanges with contacts he or she has previously exchanged snaps in the past. That said, should a user want to spark a conversation with a new contact, he still needs to send a photo or video message beforehand. What's good about the instant messaging feature is that when the user leaves the conversation, the messages in the app disappear as well. Just like that, back to a clean slate. Should you prefer to save individual messages, simply tap on the screen.
"When you leave the chat screen, messages viewed by both you and your friend will be cleared - but either of you can always tap or screenshot to save anything you'd like to keep (addresses, to-do lists, etc.)!", the company says in a blog post.
Video calling, on the other hand, is allowed when users have their apps open and they are engaged in the same conversation. When this happens, what used to be a yellow capture button will turn into a blue one, which was called by the company as "here." There is no ringtone or answer button when a video call is being made, though. The video call merely appears on the screen and it's up to the other user to decide whether to activate or not. Oh, and there's a rear-facing camera, of course. Neither is there an end button to, well, end the video call. User simply lifts up a finger to end the call. The video quality, although not the HD quality type, is good.
The interface looked more refine and the menus less cluttered, reviews also say. Several buttons and icons in the app were redesigned as well. The text font became smaller but subtler.
Analysts say the new features of Snapchat place the company in intense competition with other similar messaging apps that grew popular over the years, such as WhatsApp, Kik, WeChat, Facebook's Messenger and who knows what's up next. Each one of them boasting of new add-ons for a more personalized experience for its users.
Surely, the new features even more makes Snapchat an eye-candy for potential investors or partnerships, or even buyers. Recall that earlier, it was reported that its CEO Evan Spiegel rejected an offer worth $3 billion from Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. Amazon and Google also expressed their interest over the platform. All of this Snapchat turned down, despite receiving criticisms on its security vulnerabilities and facing a legal case over who owns the original concept of the company.
Interestingly, Snapchat surpasses other photo-sharing apps, according to research. It claims to have more than 700 million shared snaps per day on its platform, thereby making it the most used among all similar apps in the world. Now, that makes Snapchat a real competition.
Spiegel, however, seems to be different among the breed of innovators and shies away from talks of competition, money or advertisements.
"I don't want to disrupt anything. We never conceive of our products as disruptive - we don't look at something and say 'let's disrupt that.' It's always about how we can evolve this and make this better," he told The Verge.
