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The race to control the smartphone camera is heating up among messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and Snapchat, as photo- and video-sharing positions itself to replace text as the main mode of communication. Although Snapchat ruled the camera in 2015, by the end of March 2017, Facebook had turned each of its four social apps into camera-first platforms by utilizing popular features similar to Snapchat's. The company's massive global audience gives it a leg-up against its smaller rival.
- Instagram, the photo-sharing app Facebook bought in 2012, introduced Stories in August last year. Stories, a clone of Snapchat Stories, is a feature that lets users share a collection of moments from their day that other users can view as many times as they want over a 24-hour period.
- Facebook Messenger added an in-app camera to the app in December 2016 before launching Messenger Day in March 2017, which was similar again to Snapchat Story.
- WhatsApp began rolling out the ability for users to post a video as their status rather than the text interface in February 2017.
- Facebook added Stories to the top of the News Feed of its main app, and launched the Camera Effects Platform during F8 in April. With this new platform, the company plans to leverage its extensive developer community to become the next major app ecosystem, according to The New York Times. The platform will make it easier for developers to build things like stickers and 3D masks that can be overlaid onto photos and videos on Facebook's portfolio of apps.
The urgency felt by both Snap and Facebook is in part driven by how smartphone cameras are becoming central to the way users engage with their handsets.
- On New Year's Eve 2016, WhatsApp users sent 8 billion photos and 2.4 billion videos globally, accounting for around 17% of all messages sent over the app during the 24-hour period, according to Recode.
- As of Q4 2016, roughly 2.5 billion snaps — photos or videos — were sent each day by Snapchat users globally, according to Snap.
But chat apps could have an uphill battle as they strive to convince developers to build camera capabilities such as 3D face masks. During Facebook's F8 developer conference in late April, Facebook engineering director Ficus Kirkpatrick was asked several times what the value of such features were, according to The Information. Without the support of developers, the technology could be facing a similar scenario as Messenger's chatbot platform in the latter half of 2016: After an initial period of hype, when developers rushed to build bots for the chat app, interest dampened as brands struggled to find effective use cases.