Snapchat now has over 500 million installs on Android

Image credit: Android Central

It comes as no surprise that messaging app Snapchat crossed the half a million mark of installations on Android. And this landmark is reached a couple of days after Snap Inc., the company behind Snapchat, went public. It isn’t a secret though that development on Android has been a bit subpar when compared to the app’s development on iOS. Thankfully, the recent IPO filing of Snap Inc. acknowledges this shortcoming. And it might bring better features on Android, finally.

As mentioned in the IPO: “The majority of our user engagement is on smartphones with iOS operating systems. As a result, although our products work with Android mobile devices, we have prioritized development of our products to operate with iOS operating systems rather than smartphones with Android operating systems. To continue growth in user engagement, we will need to prioritize development of our products to operate on smartphones with Android operating systems. If we are unable to improve operability of our products on smartphones with Android operating systems, and those smartphones become more popular and fewer people use smartphones with iOS operating systems, our business could be seriously harmed.”

Source: Android Police

Snap Inc.’s Spectacles comes with secret AR filter

We love a good Easter Egg in our tech products and it seems Snap Inc. has been able to hide a useful one in its wearable. The Spectacles have a hidden filter that’s basically an implementation of augmented reality. The tweet by Moshe Isaacian shows that once you point the glasses at the lettering on its protective case, it shows floating bubbles with what looks like snaps of other people or something that Snap Inc. has curated. While not groundbreaking, it shows what else Snap Inc. and Snapchat can do with the hard-to-find smart glasses.

Found a cool @Spectacles secret! If you point your Snapchat camera at package's lettering, it gives you a special filter!

How it works: pic.twitter.com/wPSVpQjk5T

— Moshe Isaacian 💡 (@MosheIsaacian) November 23, 2016

 Source: The Next Web

Snap sells Spectacles through pop-up vending machines

Snap Inc., the company that owns Snapchat, is taking an unusual route to promote its Spectacles. These glasses are the company’s own wearable device to take Snaps (photos and videos) with. Snap starting selling the devices by setting up a big yellow vending machine called the Snapbot on a beach boardwalk in Venice, California. The glasses sell for US$130 and were quickly sold out. If you don’t try and buy the wearables from sellers who have started selling these on eBay for $1,000, the only way to buy Spectacles is through these vending machines. It’s said these will be brought to different locations for a day and the locations will only be shared 24 hours in advance.

Source: Reuters

WhatsApp tests its own Snapchat Stories clone

If this ever make its way out of testing, another Facebook-owned app will be getting the Snapchat Stories treatment. WhatsApp is testing what it calls Status, a new feature that will let you share photos and videos you can overlay with emojis and text and it stays up for 24 hours. According to BGR India, the feature is currently available to registered public beta testers of the app using rooted Android or iOS devices.

The app on Android gets a new Status tab between the Chats and Calls tabs. It doesn’t take over your ability to share a status message on the service. What it does is create a new channel for users to share visual content with their contacts. At the moment it doesn’t allow users to manually delete Status updates after they’ve been shared. And they can’t be set to have longer or shorter lifespan online. You can specify which contacts can get the updates. This feature seems to be in line with Mark Zuckerberg’s push to prioritize video content as they try to drive video ad revenue. It’s something that WhatsApp can now take advantage of as it changed its privacy policy to basically allow business to show ads to users. Now, we have to see if this makes it out of beta.

Source: TechCrunch