When an app’s feature strikes a chord with its users, other apps tend to follow suit. The idea of swiping down to refresh a page was first introduced by the Twitter app Tweetie in 2008; now it’s everywhere. Facebook introduced trending news to be more like Twitter, while Twitter added inline media to look more like Facebook. The LinkedIn blogging interface looks exactly like Medium.
Perhaps no app has been as influential as Snapchat, the social messaging service founded by then 21-year-old Evan Spiegel. At least in the US market, Snapchat pioneered disappearing messages, face filters, and the idea of Stories, an ephemeral feed of videos broadcast to all your friends at once.
Snapchat has also been responsible for user interaction innovations like generating QR codes to make it easier to share user names (which was soon copied by Facebook), as well as using the same button to take a photo with a quick press or video with a long press (which was immediately copied when Instagram started supporting video).
This week, Microsoft announced a major redesign of Skype. The video calling service now has Highlights, a feed of videos that expire after a week, and can be shared among a select group of contacts — a features that clearly inspired by Snapchat.
Skype is just the latest social media platform to copy Snapchat. In the five years since Snapchat’s launch, it has reshaped what we expect from social media and messaging. Even iMessage, which comes preloaded on iPhones, shares some resemblance to Snapchat. Facebook, Inc. has been particularly aggressive, adding Snapchat-like tweaks to its major apps including Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and especially Instagram. “If you want to be a creative company, you gotta get comfortable with and basically enjoy the fact that people are going to copy your products if you make great stuff,” Spiegel said on an investor call after being asked about Facebook.
To put it all in perspective, here’s a look at all of the apps that have copied Snapchat.
