A former employee for Snap, the company behind Snapchat, once told me there’s an inside joke at the company that Snap is “the research and development team for Meta Platforms.” The joke started as a self-deprecating dig at Instagram’s ripping off of Snapchat’s Stories feature in 2016. Nowadays, though, it often feels like Snapchat isn’t just doing R&D for Meta—it’s doing research for every big platform.
The app is consistently ahead of its peers when it comes to innovative new features like augmented reality, wearables and ephemeral messaging. But the question every time Snap releases a groundbreaking new gizmo is whether it will be the thing that finally makes the company feel relevant again. It briefly looked like Snap was having something of a renaissance last summer, for example, after it made a push to bring creators back onto the platform. But then Snap announced big layoffs in August amid a stock price freefall.
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