Snapchat Popularity Skyrockets Despite Competitive Facebook App

If you've never heard of Snapchat, ask your kids about it, especially if they're teenagers. It's billed as a real-time picture chatting application, and that's exactly what it is, making it an ideal tool for so-called "sexting." Using Snapchat, you can send photos or videos to recipients with a timer attached, so after a few seconds (or however long you attach the timer), it disappears for good, or at least they're supposed to (turns out images and videos are recoverable).

Snapchat has become wildly popular in recent weeks and has overshadowed Facebook Poke, the social network's own version of an app that automatically deletes messages.


Facebook is home to over 1 billion registered users, and it was thought that a native app akin to Snapchat would dominate the category, but that hasn't been the case. Snapchat is still one of the more popular app downloads on Android and iOS. It's especially popular among teenagers, who discovered the app before the media did, and as previously mentioned, it's been linked to sexting.

Towards that end, users should be advised that it's not that difficult to save pictures sent through apps like Snapchat, whether it's by taking screenshots before the timed photo disappears, or digging up deleted data from a smartphone's cache.