Snapchat Announced Snap Minis Along With Other New Features at a Virtual Summit

by Kay Lee

At the 2020 Snap virtual Partner Summit, the company announced several new features and a new product dubbed Snap Minis – bite-sized apps developed by third-party software engineers. The Minis are located right in the Snapchat app and work on any device without the need to download and install them.

Snap Minis can be opened within Snapchat in the chats function and used by several users at a time, making it easy and more fun for friends to interact with each other. They are small apps “tailor-made for friends” that are built on HTML5, meaning that developers don’t need to learn a new programming language to create new Snap Minis.

The third-party apps are near games inside a keyboard tab on the chat screen. When you tap one, the Snap Mini becomes a full-screen app that can help you order movie tickets, compare schedules, or even experience a guided meditation. Snapchat’s partners in Snap Minis are such apps as Headspace, Atom Tickets, and the music festival Coachella.

“We can’t wait to work with more partners to see how they’ll bring new Minis to life for friends on Snapchat,” said Will Wu, Snap’s product director.

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Here’s a list of the first seven Snap Minis that will be available within the app for iOS and Android users in July:

  1. Coachella: now, you can plan your festival lineup with friends right in Snapchat.
  2. Headspace: Headspace Mini will let users enjoy meditations and send supporting messages to their friends.
  3. Let’s Do It: this one will help you and your friends make a decision as a group.
  4. Movie Tickets by Atom: with the help of this Snap Mini, you’ll be able to choose movie tickets with friends and individually pay for them.
  5. Prediction Master: an app from Mammoth Media that lets you “make predictions.”
  6. Saturn: this app allows students to share and compare their class schedules.
  7. Tembo: with this app, you can create flashcards that help while learning.
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Apart from Snap Minis, Snapchat also introduces several other features that are promised to change the app’s content, functionality, and look.

  • Camera Kit is an expansion to Snap Kit and a tool that lets developers use lenses created in Lens Studio and bring them to their app.
  • Dynamic Lenses allows you to incorporate real-time information into Snapchat lenses. The partners here are Rally Road, Nike, and Yahoo Fantasy Sports.
  • Bitmoji for Games means that developers can now bring Bitmoji to their third-party games. Partners here are Scrabble Go and Uno!
  • Snap Games are games that friends can play together on the app.
  • Lens Studio now features SnapML, which enables developers to bring their machine-learning models to power Lenses. Here, Snapchat partnered with Wannaby, Prisma, and CV2020.
  • Local Lenses help users build an AR world on top of their neighborhoods.
  • Scan partners: with the new PlantSnap, you can identify 90% of existing plants and trees, and with Dog Scanner, you can identify nearly 400 dog breeds. An integration with Yuka will help users find nutrition information by scanning food packages.
  • Voice Scan will allow users to issue voice commands to find Lenses.

Over the past few months, the number of Snapchat's daily active users has skyrocketed due to the coronavirus pandemic. Now, almost 229 million visit the platform every day, and more than 100 million are in the United States.