Snapchat

How Snaps Are Stored And Deleted

Thu, 09 May 2013 19:23:39 -0700

There’s been some speculation lately about how snaps are stored and when and how they are deleted. We’ve always tried to be upfront about how things work and we haven’t made any changes to our practices, so we thought it’d be cool to go over things in a bit more detail.

Storing Snaps

When someone sends a snap, it is uploaded to our servers, the recipient(s) are sent a notification that they have a new snap and the Snapchat app downloads a copy of the message. The image or video from the message is stored in a temporary folder in the device’s memory. This is sometimes in internal memory, RAM or external memory like an SD Card—depending on the platform and whether it’s a video or a picture.

Deleting Snaps From Our Servers

When a snap is viewed and the timer runs out, the app notifies our servers, which in turn notify the sender that the snap has been opened. Once we’ve been notified that a snap has been opened by all of its recipients, it is deleted from our servers. If a snap is still unopened after 30 days, it too is deleted from our servers.

Deleting Snaps From the Recipient’s Device

After a snap has been opened, the temporary copy of it is deleted from the device’s storage. We try to make this happen immediately, sometimes it might take a minute or two. The files are deleted by sending a “delete” instruction to the phone’s file system. This is the normal way that things are usually deleted on computers and phones—we don’t do anything special (like “wiping”).

Extra Details

While an unopened snap is being stored on the device, it’s not impossible to circumvent the Snapchat app and access the files directly. This isn’t something we support or encourage and in most cases it would involve jailbreaking or “rooting” the phone and voiding its warranty. If you’re trying to save a snap, it would be easier (and safer) to just take a screenshot or take a picture with another camera.

Also, if you’ve ever tried to recover lost data after accidentally deleting a drive or maybe watched an episode of CSI, you might know that with the right forensic tools, it’s sometimes possible to retrieve data after it has been deleted. So… you know… keep that in mind before putting any state secrets in your selfies :)

Team Snapchat

Snap Spam (Ew.)

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 08:23:33 -0700

Early this morning, some Snapchatters alerted us that they had received unwanted snaps from people who weren’t their friends. Upon initial investigation, it appears that an individual created multiple accounts and sent snaps to Snapchatters with public accounts.

Our engineering team responded quickly (nice work guys!) by temporarily turning off new account creation and preventing Snapchatters from receiving snaps from friends that they had not previously added on Snapchat.

Spam is a problem on many services with large audiences. We know spammers totally suck and we’re working on a long term solution to prevent spam from entering your feed. In the meantime, please adjust your settings to determine who can send you snaps. For a spam-free experience we recommend “Only My Friends” :)

Sorry for the spam - we’ll keep you updated as we work on this issue.

Evan

Snapchatter

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 17:08:20 -0800

Video on Android is Here!

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 05:38:59 -0800

Over the last four months, Android snapchatters around the world have been sharing experiences through photographs, words, and drawings. Today we are thrilled to announce the arrival of video to our Android community! It is hard to imagine that just a few months ago we were beta testing our app with just a few new friends in Norway.

Making Snapchat video for Android has been exciting, but has also had its fair share of challenges. The Android phones that many of us use were never designed with Snapchat in mind, and that can be tough when developing a hardware-based application. The video feeds and playback behavior can differ greatly - often with no guarantees or warnings. Some users will still experience difficulties, and we want to work with you to make Snapchat perfect (email us!), but we hope many of you simply come to love video snaps.

But it isn’t just video! We have revamped our notification system to give you more informative, exciting, and customizable notifications from your friends. Snapchat on Android will now have significantly more reliable behavior when you are out and about, and we have improved both camera frame-rates and navigation speed by redesigning portions of our camera.

It is so much fun building this app for the Android Snapchat community. We have a ton of great updates on the way - stay tuned and happy snapping!

Daniel

Our Biggest Update Yet: v4.0 Phantom!

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 00:54:00 -0800

It’s been a busy couple of months at Snapchat. With over 50 million snaps shared every day, we’ve had to do a lot of work to make sure our service can continue to support a growing community of snappers. Today, we’re thrilled to announce a major update to our iPhone application – video snaps!

Snapchat is all about sharing moments as they happen, and video is a great way to capture those moments. Unfortunately, with most camera applications, by the time you’ve switched from your still camera to your video camera and are ready to go, you’ve already missed the moment. It’s really frustrating. So we built something different – and we think it makes a lot more sense.

Instead of toggling back and forth between a photo and a video setting, we’ve combined them into one button. If you want to take a photo, just tap the button. If you want to capture video, hold the button down. When you’re done recording, lift your finger. Super simple. Video snaps are up to ten seconds long, and like photo snaps, can only be viewed once in the application.

But that’s not all – this update has a lot of great stuff. We’ve made capturing and sending faster with a full-screen preview, added landscape captions (just rotate your iDevice!) and there’s a new settings page to help you manage who can send you snaps.

As always, we appreciate your feedback! Feel free to shoot us an email if you need help or just want to say hi: support@snapchat.com

We're Thankful

Fri, 23 Nov 2012 08:53:16 -0800

Yesterday was a huge day for us. Millions of people used Snapchat to share their Thanksgiving festivities and send holiday wishes to their friends and family. We sent and received all sorts of turkey snaps – raw turkeys on their way into the oven, silly turkey drawings, and steaming hot turkeys doused in cranberry sauce!

Unfortunately, all of this excitement was not without a few hiccups. Our servers struggled to keep up with over one thousand snaps sent every second.

We apologize if you weren’t able to send snaps with the normal speed and ease that we strive to provide every day, and we’re thankful for your continued support of our service. We’ve got some exciting holiday surprises on the way for you!

Love,

Team Snapchat

It's finally here!

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 11:21:06 -0700

Snapchat is now available in the Google Play store for all Android devices running v2.2 or higher.

This isn’t just a copy of our iPhone app. We wanted to create a true Android app, and spent a lot of time making it feel just right. With all of the different devices, each with different camera hardware, it’s tough to develop an app that works really well for every user. We started by rebuilding the camera layer from the ground up in OpenGL to make sure everyone could experience a fullscreen camera preview, even if it wasn’t natively supported on the device. Then we developed a new, ultrafast way to send images and load them in the feed, and combined that with a buttery smooth custom interface. We couldn’t be more excited to bring you a truly first-class Android app.

A huge thank you to all of our fans for your support – we know waiting is never fun – and we really appreciate all of your encouraging emails, tweets, and facebook messages. You guys make those late nights totally worth it.

If you see a bug please let us know! We’ve only been able to test on 250 devices-and that’s just a small fraction of the Android world.

BTW iPhoners…get ready for the craziest Snapchat release yet-coming soon :)

1 Billion

Sun, 28 Oct 2012 19:10:00 -0700

Our Snapchat community has now shared over 1 billion snaps - with over 20 million unique moments shared every day. We’re absolutely thrilled, and we couldn’t have done it without you. Thank you for your support and belief in our product. We feel privileged to work on Snapchat every day!

Snapchat Turns 1 Today!

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 13:50:57 -0700

As you know, it takes a village to raise a child (or one really good nanny). In our case, it took a village. We’re humbled and flattered by all the love and support we’ve received from the Snapchat community.

We realize it’s a bit cliché, but this felt like a good time to share three ideas that really matter to us. These ideas will drive the decisions we make while developing Snapchat over the next year.

We believe in sharing authentic moments with friends. It’s not all about fancy vacations, sushi dinners, or beautiful sunsets. Sometimes it’s an inside joke, a silly face, or greetings from a pet fish.

Sharing those moments should be fun. Communication is more entertaining when it’s with the people who know us best. And we know that no one is better at making us laugh than our friends.

There is value in the ephemeral. Great conversations are magical.
That’s because they are shared, enjoyed, but not saved.

Thank you again for all of your support.

Love,
Team Snapchat

We’re Sorry

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 10:53:00 -0700

We’ve been working day and night to accommodate the massive increases in traffic on the Snapchat service and prepare for a major product update. With millions of snaps sent every day, sometimes our servers are slower than we’d like. To address that problem we developed a faster way to write data to our servers. Unfortunately, this morning, when we pushed that change, some account data was corrupted. This affected 0.3% of our users.

We know how much it sucks when Snapchat goes down. It’s our favorite way to stay in touch with friends and make each other laugh. It hurts when we can’t provide our service to all of our awesome snappers.

We really appreciate your support – on Twitter, via email, and on Facebook. We’re reaching out to everyone who has been affected so that we can begin the process of restoring access to those accounts. Please let us know if you continue to experience issues: support@snapchat.com

Some really exciting product announcements are on the way – stay tuned and happy snapping! We’re really sorry we let you down today.

Love,

Team Snapchat

Team Snapchat goes to Norway!

Sun, 09 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Drawing Contest!

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 15:55:00 -0700

We’re excited to announce our first contest, which challenges YOU to send us your most creative and fun snap using the new drawing feature! Feel free to use a caption too.

The top 10 finalists will be featured on our Facebook page and the top 3 will win some awesome prizes! Our grand prize winner will recieve a $100 iTunes gift card and a Team Snapchat tank!

Anyone can enter, just take a snap (don’t forget to save it!) and send it to contest@snapchat.com with your name, hometown, and age with the subject as ‘Drawing Contest Entry.’

You can submit up to 3 entries. Entries can be submitted until August 23rd at 6pm PST.

Be sure to check out the full contest rules and prize details below:

http://www.snapchat.com/contest

Happy Birthday Bobby!

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 17:13:42 -0700

Our bestie, co-founder, and resident dark hacking wizard Bobby is turning 24 today! In honor of Bobby’s favorite super hero, Batman, and the premiere of The Dark Knight Rises we’ve been sending silly Batman snaps all day. Join in the fun and send one to Team Snapchat!

100 Million

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 17:39:35 -0700

A lot has happened over the past few weeks. We’re thrilled to announce that two terrific and talented engineers (and friends) have joined the team – welcome Daniel and David! We have also hired a wonderful community manager, Dena, who is already helping us get out from underneath our enormous email backlog. If you’re still waiting for support (sorry!) we promise that help is on the way.

We’re currently testing a super fast and fun update that should be out by the end of the month. Password recovery, bug fixes, a faster camera and drawing are coming soon to an iOS device near you! We’ve also got some top-secret stuff in the works.

For our Android fans – we’re hard at work building a great Snapchat experience for all of your devices! It’s not easy but we want to make sure it’s a great product. Shoot us an email if you’re interested in testing a pre-release version.

Last but not least – we want to thank all of you for your continued support of Snapchat. Over 110 million images have been sent through our service! Woohoo! We couldn’t have done it without you.

Evan

Let’s chat.

Wed, 09 May 2012 19:11:00 -0700

My co-founder Bobby and I met at Stanford in 2009. I was a freshman studying Product Design and Bobby was a junior working on his B.S. in Mathematical and Computational Science. Our first project was Future Freshman – a site that would forever improve the way high school students applied to college. Or so we thought. The site failed to get traction but we learned something important — we loved working together.

In April 2011 we moved into the not yet lucrative world of mobile photo sharing. With most photo apps on the market advertising ways to make photos prettier or more stylized, we thought there was an opportunity to do something different. We wanted a place to share awkward selfies and funny photos with our friends.

And after hearing hilarious stories about emergency detagging of Facebook photos before job interviews and photoshopping blemishes out of candid shots before they hit the Internet (because your world would crumble if anyone found out you had a pimple on the 38th day of 9th grade), there had to be a better solution.

We quickly got the first prototype up and running and continued to develop it throughout the following summer in Los Angeles. We worked tirelessly - except on beach days - with great input from close friends and family. Then in September 2011 we launched in the AppStore.

To get a better sense of how people were using Snapchat and what we could do to make it better, we reached out to some of our users. We were thrilled to hear that most of them were high school students who were using Snapchat as a new way to pass notes in class—behind-the-back photos of teachers and funny faces were sent back and forth throughout the day. Server data supported this and we saw peaks of activity during the school day and dips on the weekends.

We still can’t see any of the Snaps sent through our service, but we have tweets, emails, and Snapchat-tagged photos on Instagram to keep us tuned in to what our creative users are doing.

Snapchat isn’t about capturing the traditional Kodak moment. It’s about communicating with the full range of human emotion — not just what appears to be pretty or perfect. Like when I think I’m good at imitating the face of a star-nosed mole, or if I want to show my friend the girl I have a crush on (it would be awkward if that got around), and when I’m away at college and miss my Mom…er…my friends.

We’re building a photo app that doesn’t conform to unrealistic notions of beauty or perfection but rather creates a space to be funny, honest or whatever else you might feel like at the moment you take and share a Snap.

We love the app — couldn’t go a day without it — and we’re super excited about the future.

Stay tuned. We have some really cool stuff on the way.

Evan