Snapchat founder and CEO Evan Spiegel attends a session during the Viva Technology trade show in Paris on June 17, 2022.
Eric Piermont | AFP | Getty Images
After more than a decade as a mobile-only service, Snapchat is coming to your desktop.
Snap, the father of the popular photo and messaging app, said Monday that it is launching Snapchat for the web, which allows users to send messages and make video calls to their contacts from their computers.
It is a remarkable development for a company that grew up targeting young users with a viral photo-sharing service for their phones, while offering little more than a landing page for their website. By switching to desktop computers, Snap can recognize that its users have grown and many of them now work on large screens at home or in the office.
The new desktop version of Snapchat will initially only be available to users in Australia and New Zealand, in addition to Snapchat + subscribers in the US, UK and Canada. Snap launched Snapchat + in June, allowing users to pay $ 3.99 a month for more advanced features, such as changing the icon style of their app and seeing who has seen their content.
The web offering will be a smaller version of the mobile app, focusing primarily on the app’s messaging feature instead of its Stories feature.
Like the basic Snap app, messages will disappear after 24 hours, and any Snaps user who sees them from their desktop computers will be deleted right after viewing them.
Finally, Snap says it will bring more features of the app to the desktop version, including the ability for users to animate their video calls with the use of lenses. Currently, people will need to access Snapchat for the web using the Chrome browser, but the company said it would soon support other browsers and could launch a desktop app in the future.
Snap is expected to report second-quarter earnings on Thursday after a tough first half of the year for the company. Shares of Snap fell 43 percent in May, a day after the company said it shouldn’t target and have fallen more than 70 percent this year.
Analysts will focus especially on Snap’s results, because the company is the first of the top manufacturers of ad-supported apps to report earnings for this period. Many advertisers have increased their spending as inflation has swept through the economy.
“Since we published a guide on April 21, 2022, the macroeconomic environment has deteriorated more and more rapidly than expected,” Snap said in May.
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