Gone in a Snap

Emmanuel Rodriguez, Contributor

Snap. A picture is taken, uploaded, viewed. Then, snap. Ten seconds later, and it’s gone. That’s Snapchat for you; however, Snapchat may be gone in a snap as well.

As more and more teenagers are using Instagram and Twitter, the amount of users on Snapchat is starting to decline.

“I stopped using the app ’cause it had no purpose anymore and Instagram was already doing everything it already did plus more,” said Anthony Vasquez, a South Broward high school student.

Snapchat is a phone application used for messaging and sharing multimedia. You can send and receive videos as well pictures while using filters that can change how your face looks. One of its well known features on the app is that sending a  pictures or videos can be temporary. Users can also choose whether or not they want messages to be erased after they are viewed.

Snapchat is losing money, $325 million during one quarter alone in 2018.

Top competitors create a losing battle for Snapchat. They create Snapchat’s main problem: losing it’s users. This is because Instagram and Facebook have implemented features similar to that of Snapchat, such as stories and photos that disappear. Snapchat makes money by the amount of users who constantly use the app. Those who are on the app are constantly hit by advertisments. For this reason Snapchat losing users means Snapchat losing money.

According to social analyst, Venture Beat, “Its parent company Snapchat’s stock price has fallen from $16.21 per share last December to $5.18 per share Wednesday morning.”

Snapchat is also more fitted toward IOS devices while many of its users use android. This gives android users a glitchy and laggy experience.

According to Venture Beat, the issue with Snapchat is that many consumers use Android products instead of IOS.  Many of these people live in Asia where Android products are popular. Snapchat has announced that it is working on a more functional update for android, however, there hasn’t been any recent news. 

Even today, the update has yet to come out. The longer the company takes to roll out this update the more users it will lose. It has already lost to many.

In 2017 Snapchat released an update but it did not improve its functions it only changed the way it looked. This was a major update for the app as before it was mostly basic. While the update made the app more vibrant and less plain many people hated it. It made everything complicated and people weren’t used to it. It was so bad that people signed a petition to try and revert it to it original state.

According to USA Today, “More than 1.25 million people signed a Change.org petition begging Snapchat to revert to its previous look.”

Many people left because of this update and some have come back; however, most left permanently.

That same year Snapchat took another blow when an advertisement was surrounded by major controversy.

According to USA Today, Singer Rihanna blasted Snapchat over an advertisement that made light of an assault by her ex boyfriend.

As a result of this, Snapchat lost 800 million dollars in stock value. After 2017, Snapchat was in a hole, and every year Snapchat seems to fall deeper.