Ghost in the machine: Snapchat isn‘t mobile-first — it‘s something else entirely

In the span of just a few years, Snapchat has grown from a controversial app known for risqué disappearing messages to a social media powerhouse valued at over $20 billion. With 150 million daily active users sending over 3 billion snaps per day, Snapchat now rivals the reach and engagement of far more established networks like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.[^1]

On the surface, Snapchat appears to be the ultimate embodiment of the "mobile-first" ethos that has defined this era of smartphone apps. Its slick interface and creative tools are exquisitely tailored to mobile. However, a closer examination reveals that Snapchat isn‘t just mobile-first – it‘s something else entirely. By questioning many established principles of mobile design and interaction, Snapchat offers a glimpse of where mobile and social media may be headed next.

Snapchat by the numbers

Snapchat‘s growth has been nothing short of phenomenal. The app took just 12 months from its July 2011 release to reach 1 million monthly active users^2, a milestone that took Facebook 10 months and Twitter over 2 years to reach.^9 From Q1 2014 to Q1 2018, Snapchat grew its daily user base from 50 million to over 190 million.[^1] Over 60% of 13-34 year old smartphone users in the US are now on Snapchat.[^1]

Source: Snapchat quarterly earnings reports

But Snapchat‘s impact extends beyond just its sizable audience. Snapchatters spend an average of over 30 minutes per day in the app, with over 3 billion snaps created every day.[^1] 60% of Snapchat‘s daily users create content every day, compared to only 5-10% of users on conventional social networks like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.^12

The volume of photos shared on Snapchat now exceeds the number shared on Facebook and Instagram combined.^13 Snapchat reaches 41% of 18-34 year olds in the US on any given day. Suffice it to say, Snap has carved out a central place for itself in the lives of a key demographic.

Mobile-first but unconventional

Snapchat is a quintessentially mobile-first experience, leveraging key smartphone capabilities like the camera, real-time location, push notifications and gesture-based UX in ways that would be impossible on the desktop web. As a full-stack developer, I‘m especially impressed by how fluid and well-optimized the Snapchat experience is across a range of devices. Performance tuning and memory management are clearly top priorities.

At the same time, Snapchat breaks many established rules of mobile design and user experience. The app is notoriously difficult for new users to learn, with key features like filters, lenses and chat often hidden behind non-obvious gestures and swipes. There is no formal onboarding experience and little built-in help or documentation.

While this "shareable design" approach would be a non-starter in most apps, for Snapchat it cleverly reinforces the feeling of belonging to an exclusive club once you learn the ropes. It‘s "software as a secret handshake". As Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel has said, "We‘re not trying to build an experience for all of the world. We‘re trying to build an experience that deeply understands a much smaller group of people."^14

Snapchat‘s information architecture is also highly unorthodox. Instead of a more typical hierarchical or hub-and-spoke navigation model, the app is structured around five distinct tabs. But crucially, instead of the camera serving a secondary role, it is the central home screen around which everything else revolves.

From a technical standpoint, I imagine this introduces some interesting state management challenges, especially when layering compute-intensive filters and lenses. But it reinforces the centrality of visual communication to the Snapchat experience.

A reprieve from social media fatigue

2018 may be remembered as a tipping point for social media. Facebook is grappling with a cascade of crises over data privacy, content moderation and misinformation. Instagram is dealing with fallout over its effects on mental health and self-esteem.^15

Twitter, while vital, often feels like a never-ending shouting match. As a society, we are grappling with our attention being weaponized and our brains re-wired by the algorithms that increasingly mediate our lives.

Amid this backdrop, Snapchat offers something of a reprieve. Its ephemerality reduces the performance anxiety of other social networks where every post becomes part of your permanent record. There are no hashtags, public comments or other viral loops.

The lack of a central feed or visible metrics like Likes and follower counts also creates a very different set of incentives. As researcher Nathan Jurgenson has argued, Snapchat acts as a counterbalance to the highly curated "documentary vision" of other social media:

"With Facebook and Instagram, every interaction is turned into a data point, an everlasting piece of personal brand equity, a visual identity to be cultivated, maintained, and protected. Snapchat is instead for the spontaneous, the un-curated, the every day."^16

In this sense, despite (or perhaps because of) its reputation for nudes and silly selfies, Snapchat can feel like one of the most authentic social networks out there today – a place to let your guard down with close friends.

Stories and the power of now

Arguably Snapchat‘s biggest contribution to the evolution of social media has been Stories – ephemeral collections of vertical-format photos and videos that disappear after 24 hours. The emphasis on documenting the moment taps into the FOMO (fear of missing out) that is endemic in youth culture.

Pioneered by Snapchat in October 2013, the Stories format has proven so sticky that it has been cloned by almost every other major social and messaging app. Instagram Stories, which is essentially a carbon copy of Snapchat Stories, now has over 400 million daily users – more than twice as many as Snapchat itself.^17

Source: Instagram quarterly announcements, Snap Inc. SEC filings

While Instagram may have greater scale, Snapchat remains the clear leader in engagement. Users younger than 25 spend more than 30 minutes a day on Snapchat, and more than 40 minutes a day on the chat feature alone, according to the company.^14

This focus on close friends and visually communicating in the moment lends itself to a very different style of content than the "link in bio" culture of Instagram. There is an intimacy and spontaneity to Snapchat that the hyper-curated aesthetic of Instagram, for all its glossy appeal, will always struggle to match.

The camera as a platform

More than perhaps any other social app, Snapchat has invested deeply in the idea of the smartphone camera as a platform for augmented reality and computer vision. As far back as 2015, Snapchat acquired the Ukrainian startup Looksery to power its selfie lenses.^18

Then in 2017, Snap went even further, launching its "Camera Platform" for developers to extend what the Snapchat camera can do. Snap‘s facial recognition and tracking technology is now sophisticated enough to enable features like reactive 3D Bitmoji avatars and real-time environmental effects.

Source: Snap 3D Friendmoji example via The Verge

As a developer, I‘m blown away by how far Snapchat has pushed the boundaries of mobile performance and real-time rendering. Features like Snappables, which are multiplayer AR games you control with your facial expressions, hint at entirely new categories of mobile experiences.

The recent launch of iOS 12 and ARKit 2 opens up even more possibilities for Snapchat‘s Camera Platform, with persistent content anchored to real-world locations. In the near future, it‘s not hard to imagine a kind of "AR cloud" that merges elements of Snapchat‘s Map, Memories and crowdsourced Our Stories into a persistent digital overlay atop the physical world.

China and the WeChat model

To envision where Snapchat and Western social apps may be headed, we should look to China. Apps like WeChat and QQ have already surpassed the functionality of Facebook, subsuming everything from messaging to banking to food delivery and more into unified "super-apps".

WeChat in particular offers a tantalizing glimpse of mobile‘s future. With nearly 1 billion monthly users, WeChat is both a thriving ecosystem of lightweight "mini-programs" and the default interface for everything from hailing cabs to paying rent to accessing government services.^19

For most Chinese smartphone owners, WeChat is the very Operating System their daily lives run on – the remote control for reality. Snap appears to be betting that the camera, rather than the chat window, will be the organizing interface for this new world where the digital and physical blend.

Privacy and the public record

For all its emphasis on ephemerality, however, it would be naive to think that fleeting photo messages are truly private. Disappearing content introduces some tricky legal and ethical questions.

Law enforcement agencies can (and frequently do) subpoena user records from technology companies. Snapchat itself voluntarily complied with some 1,500 legal requests in 2018.^20 And thanks to screenshots, the wrong snap sent to the wrong person can quickly make its way to the wider Web.

These privacy questions take on even greater urgency as Snap expands into location-tagged and crowdsourced content like the Map. Somewhat paradoxically, Snapchat may need to invest more in data security and digital archiving if it wants to preserve its status as a safe space for unfiltered, in-the-moment sharing.

Spectacles and beyond

Snapchat‘s biggest bet on the future of mobile interaction has been Spectacles – sunglasses with a built-in video camera for capturing first-person snaps. After an initial burst of hype, the first two generations failed to gain mass adoption.

But Snap is now on its third attempt, with the latest model adding still photo capture and water resistance. Spectacles offer a glimpse of a future where recording and sharing our lived experience is as effortless as seeing.

As camera hardware, computer vision and display technologies continue to advance, it‘s not hard to imagine a successor to Spectacles that layers sophisticated AR graphics directly into the user‘s field of view – something like a consumer version of Microsoft‘s HoloLens or Magic Leap‘s goggles.

Snap‘s challenges

Despite its innovative products and avid user base, Snap still has its work cut out for it. The company faces relentless competition from Facebook, which shamelessly copied the Stories format in Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook and Messenger.

Outside the US and Europe, Snapchat has struggled to gain the same foothold, with Instagram Stories and WhatsApp Status dominating in many high-growth markets.^21 User growth has slowed in recent years as the "sexting app" stigma and confusing interface deter some new users.

On the revenue front, Snap has nearly quadrupled annual sales since 2015 but continues to operate at a loss as it invests in R&D and scales its ad platform.^22 Profitability will be key if Snap wants to prove that it can be a viable, independent company.

Conclusion

Snapchat represents a new paradigm for mobile interaction and social media – one that is ephemeral, intimate and rooted in close friendships rather than public performance. It shifts the focus from accumulating likes and comments to communicating in the moment.

While many established tech companies are still trying to retrofit their products for the smartphone era, Snapchat is natively mobile, leveraging the camera, sensors and touch interface in novel ways. With its AR lenses, Bitmoji and Spectacles, Snap is already pushing beyond the smartphone as we know it today.

In a time of social media fatigue, algorithmic filter bubbles and digital addiction, Snapchat offers a refreshing alternative – a return to spontaneous conversation and unfiltered human experience. For Generation Z in particular, Snapchat is more than just an app – it‘s a state of mind.

Whether it can remain independent or truly challenge the Facebook juggernaut remains to be seen. But one thing is clear: Snapchat isn‘t just mobile-first – it‘s offering the first glimpse of a post-mobile world where computing is continuous, contextual and embedded into the very fabric of daily life.

In this sense, Snapchat may not be a "ghost in the machine" so much as a friendly spirit illuminating the way forward to whatever comes next after smartphones. The question is whether Snap itself will still be around to see that future.

[^1]: Snap Inc. Q1 2019 earnings report