The youth-oriented social media platform, Snapchat has partnered with a group of third-party developers to provide a seamless user experience in the form of Snapchat Minis. Minis are small, lightweight utilities that can be found on the Snapchat app. The Mini apps are designed so that the users don’t have to switch to different apps for doing these tasks. You can now make use of these applications within the Snapchat app itself while hanging out with their friends. You can launch the Mini apps by clicking on the tiny rocket icon while chatting with others.
Apple has also integrated some mini-apps for its messaging, but the idea never really seemed to take off back then. The world is hit by a pandemic, leading to social distancing measures being adopted globally. This has forced everyone to stay indoors and minimize physical interaction. The Snapchat team realized that people are not just looking to do things online; they want to do it with their friends and families. This is how they came up with Snapchat Minis.
What all is there?
You can find a mental health app, Headspace, in Minis. Headspace is an app dedicated to meditation tutorials for relaxing and tackling stress/anxiety. The Mini version of the app offers six 3-4 minute meditation lessons.
There’s Prediction Master, which allows you to guess the outcome of several events, sports, games, and scenarios.
Let’s Do It (by Snapchat) gives you the opportunity to make collective decisions with your friends. Your friends can participate in making a decision for you. For instance, you can decide what songs to listen to, what movies you need to watch, and what you should eat for dinner.
Tembo Flashcards checks all the boxes for an interactive group studying experience. It allows users to study in a new and fun way while chatting with each other. Flashcards contain questions that need to be answered by the participating users.
More to Come
Snapchat has shared its vision to bring out a lot more of these Mini apps over the course of time. Three confirmed upcoming entries to the Mini apps are; Coachella- an app that allows the users to make plans for the festival trips, Atom- a ticket booking platform where the users can book tickets collaboratively, and Saturn- a platform where students can share and sync their class schedules. From a broad perspective, Snapchat is attempting to make the users spend more time in their app by integrating different 3rd party utilities in their platform. This looks to be a promising move by the company as the future seems to be based on a collaborative social media environment where more and more users rely on these platforms to perform daily tasks.
Mia Watson is an avid technical blogger, a magazine contributor, a publisher of guides at Blogs Book, and a professional cyber security analyst. Through her writing, she aims to educate people about the dangers and threats lurking in the digital world. scoutq