Do They Have A Competitive Advantage?

I believe that, unlike many of their competitors, Snapchat has one of the most compelling platforms for video and photography. The app opens like a camera except instead of taking pictures of the world, it acts as your dedicated selfie cam, built especially to capture everyone’s favorite subject (subjectively-speaking of course), you! The way that this application can rapidly provide live views of image modification and allow you to likely 10-20x more selfies than you normally would speaks to me. Often, people are very self-conscious in how they believe people will see them, but this app lets you wear a costume and dance like nobody’s watching, because you aren’t pressured to post publicly. This app can and does act as a normal messaging and voice/video calling app like iMessage, FaceTime, Discord, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Telegram; but it’s much more fun and friendly.

In my honest opinion, the market that Snap Inc,and thus Snapchat is competing in, is a land seldom ventured yet. In addition to all their software offerings, they are developing the technologies for lighter and brighter consumer glasses hardware they’ve coined as their “Spectacles” line of products. I’ll get into the details of these in a future post, but this is an ambition the likes of Meta, Apple, Google (partnered with Samsung) are all trying to pursue. That said, Snapchat is a very strong brand, embraced by over 400 million daily active users, and I don’t doubt they have the chops to develop a core OS (operating system), purpose-built for our future, which will only be converging further into virtual and augmented; extended realities.

Snap Inc. will be king one way or another, whether it be the hardware they pioneer, or the software they license out to hardware goliaths, because they have been developing software for mobile-based augmented reality longer than anyone. Of this I am confident in their aspirations.