

Not only that, messages are automatically deleted after a certain period of time. What’s sent in the app, stays in the app. The context of Snapchat’s mobile application and revenue models are important in explaining their aversion to non-mobile and/or third-party access to their app.įinancially, Snapchat has a strong incentive to keep users in a specific frame of access where they are most effectively targeted by ads, sponsored posts, and news/influencer stories.Įthically, Snapchat is and has always been marketed on the premise of a closed system. With more than 280 million active users worldwide, the company receives nearly $1 billion in revenue from its user base alone, totaling $2.5 billion annually with partnerships, ads, sponsorships, and others. In 2019, Snapchat made around $3 in revenue per user. Studies have estimated that an average user spends as much as 32 minutes a day on the app, and sends more than 30 messages (images, text, or stories) through the platform. The amount of data exchanged every day, every hour, and every minute is staggering. Over its 10-year course to date, Snapchat has soared to more than 100 million users in the United States alone.īy active users, it ranks as the 12th most popular social networking platform in the world.

The app allows users to send timed (or non-timed) messages containing photos, screenshots, videos, and edited images using available tools. Snapchat-the immensely popular multimedia messaging platform-has been at the heart of many use-related controversies since its release in 2011. Snapchat is aware of these backdoor entrances and consistently introduces software updates to soft and/or hard block access by emulator APIs (application programming interfaces). In the past, people have been able to access the mobile app through third-party programs or mobile OS emulators such as BlueStacks. Pushing those boundaries can open the app and the company up to usability and liability issues. In short, developers want users to adhere to an app’s intended purpose. Those platforms include things like mobile operating systems (Android, iOS), standard operating systems (Windows, macOS), or web browsers (Chrome, Edge, Safari).īy gating access to their apps, companies have greater oversight regarding security risks, application misuse, and activity monitoring, to name a few. It is at the sole discretion of a mobile application developer to design and release their app on multiple platforms. What Happened?Īccessing mobile applications through a conventional computer is difficult by design.
