Instagram wants to be your phone, not just your camera. And it wants to be better at it than Snapchat. Files buried in Instagram and the Instagram Direct standalone app’s Android Application Packages (APKs) are files and icons for “Call” and “Video Call”. APKs often show files for unreleased features that are lying dormant in an app waiting to be surfaced when… Read More
Category: Snapchat Clone
Instagram Direct one-ups Snapchat with replay privacy controls
Messaging is the heart of Snapchat, so after cloning and augmenting Stories, Instagram is hoping to boost intimate usage of Direct with privacy controls not found elsewhere. Now when you send an ephemeral photo or video from the Instagram Direct camera, you can decide whether recipients can only view it once, replay it temporarily, or will see a permanent thumbnail of it in the chat… Read More
Why Google Stories will save, not screw, Snapchat Discover
Snapchat has a new ally or enemy depending on how you look at Google’s new mobile magazine format, but the social app is welcoming the search giant. Google’s clone of Snapchat Discover called AMP Stories officially launched today, allowing news outlets to create photo/video slideshows that appear in mobile search results and on their site. Suddenly, Snapchat isn’t the only… Read More
WhatsApp hits 1.5 billion monthly users. $19B? Not so bad.
Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp sounds smarter and smarter. CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on the Q4 2017 earnings call today that WhatsApp now has 1.5 billion users and sees 60 billion messages sent per day. That’s compared to 1.3 billion monthly users and 1 billion daily active users in July. Read More
Instagram won’t comment on rumored video calling feature
Instagram copied the ‘Snap’ and now it might be going after the ‘chat’. A video calling feature was spotted in a non-public version of Instagram by WhatsApp industry blog WABetaInfo. It would let users who’ve begun an Instagram Direct message thread to video chat with each other. That could let people spend even more time in the app, but by actively… Read More
Facebook won’t retreat from Stories as it adds desktop posting
Facebook Stories might feel redundant because 300 million people use its other Snapchat clones on Instagram and WhatsApp. But Facebook is convinced that the narrative, ephemeral, camera-first format is the future of sharing… and advertising. So Facebook is doubling down on Stories by testing the ability to create them from desktop, and a much more prominent placement for viewing. Read More
What is Snapchat, now Story sharing has stopped growing?
In a betrayal of loyalty signaling poor morale, a massive dump of Snapchat’s usage stats has leaked. The most worrisome is that the number of users posting Stories has shown zero growth, an even worse performance than Snapchat’s total user growth that was sluggish this year. It appears Instagram’s Stories clone has stopped Snapchat’s most monetizable feature dead in… Read More
Instagram Stories adds no-frills photo-only posting from mobile web
Instagram really wants the developing world on Stories. They won’t be able to use Instagram’s augmented reality masks or share videos, but starting today mobile web users can post to Instagram Stories. Previously, mobile web users could only view Stories, which have to be created in Instagram’s native apps. But now users can snap photos, overlay text captions, and share them… Read More
Facebook Stories replaces Messenger Day with synced cross-posting
Facebook is cleaning up the redundancy in its Snapchat Stories clones. Today Facebook is killing off the Messenger Day stories feature and replacing it with Facebook Stories inside Messenger. Now, Facebook Stories posts in either Facebook or Messenger will appear in both apps, and viewing will be synced too so you won’t see a Story in one app if you already watched it in the other.… Read More
Spiegel hopes to save Snapchat with an algorithmic stories feed
Snap got destroyed by Wall Street today after a horrible Q3 earnings where revenue and user growth fell well under expectations. So to get things going in the right direction, CEO Evan Spiegel says Snapchat will make some bold moves not everyone will like. Specifically, it’s redesigning the app to be easier for older people to use, and its using data to power an algorithmically sorted… Read More
Instagram Stories and WhatsApp Status hit 300M users, nearly 2X Snapchat
Instagram and WhatsApp’s Snapchat clones aren’t slowing down. Today Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Instagram Stories and WhatsApp Status both now have 300 million daily active users. That’s up from 250 million for Instagram in June, and WhatsApp in July. That makes the copies almost twice the size of the original, as Snapchat’s entire app only has 173 million… Read More