Snapchat Effectively Just Killed Dozens of Competitors in One Minute

With one game changing update yesterday afternoon, March 29th 2016, Snapchat became what I believe is the single best communication app available today. While it may take some time for this to prove true, I believe this update puts Snapchat on an inevitable path to killing dozens of their competitors.  Texting apps, online phone call apps, video calling apps, even goofy GIF and sticker apps are now all chasing Snapchat which has set the benchmark for easy and fun communication.

Snapchat posted about the massive update making the following comment about their -not so modest- intentions: “We want Chat to be the best way to communicate — second only to hanging out face-to-face.”

Here are the new features that the update rolled out and the associated apps that are now playing catch up to Snapchat:

1. The Chat function allows users to send audio or video messages, GIFs, and stickers all of which can be viewed or listened to at any time.  This makes Snapchat the most feature-rich texting app available today.  All texting apps such as Textra or Chomp should be afraid. 
   
2. You can now make free phone calls over the internet (ideally a wifi connection) through the Chat function.  This isn’t a groundbreaking feature as there are many internet phone call apps, but the reason this is an app killer is because Snapchat is already in the hands of over 100 million users every single day and if those engaged users don’t have to leave Snapchat to make a phone call they likely won’t. Everything from voice-over-internet apps from your mobile carrier like my very own Rogers One Number, to Skype and Google Hangouts should all be afraid.
3. You can now have a full video chats with people. And from what I’ve seen of the sample user-experience videos I’ve watched this feature works REALLY well.  Facetime is one of the best apps for making video calls, and it’s in trouble if people stop using Facetime in favour of staying within the Snapchat ecosystem. 
   
4. Finally, the Snapchat stories feature is now set up as “rolling stories” so that when you finish watching one user’s story the next user in the daily playlist automatically starts playing.  I originally had mixed feelings about this because Snapchat is essentially assuming that users want to automatically start watching stories back-to-back as opposed to selecting which stories they want to see. Seemingly, this is a very UN-Snapchatesque change because Snapchat has historically approached app design from an extreme user-first standpoint.  That said, this will be massively beneficial for users who create Snapchat Stories. Rather than story-creators having to hope and pray that viewers will decide to click on their story, more stories will be found because they will auto-play. Expect story-creators to get more views, see better results, and thus create more and better content which makes the overall user-experience better. (You see what I did there, how I turned something that seemed to be very Un-Snapchatesque into something that is VERY Snapchatesque? Sneaky sneaky right?)

You may be surprised to hear, however, that the thing about the update that will most lead to Snapchat killing A LOT of other apps isn’t a feature. Rather, this update communicates that Snapchat’s business philosophy is to consider innovating so radically that they aren’t the slightest bit romantic about their existing features.  Snapchat is ready to dismantle their app and make sweeping changes in an effort to constantly improve the user experience.

To this point, Facebook innovated constantly first creating The Wall, then “Like” buttons, then the Edgerank algorithm, then Facebook Advertising, now Love, Haha, Wow and Angry buttons. Facebook kept users interested and improved their app with these updates while Twitter barely changed their Twitter-feed platform at all and grew stale as a result.  With Facebook stock up over 200% and Twtter stock down over 60% since their respective IPOs it’s hard to argue that Facebook isn't winning the social media app battle. If Snapchat can take the constant-improvement approach, they will almost certainly be on a better trajectory than many flash in the pan apps that are here this year and gone next.

I continue to think that 2016 is The Year of The Snap and the app is quickly becoming mainstream.  This radical update only confirms my hypothesis.  

Happy snapping everyone, you can find me on Snapchat by clicking on this sentence.  Or you can scan my Snapcode below 

Link to the Snapchat blog post with commentary on the update can be found here: http://snapchat-blog.com/post/141902878020/chat-20