Displacing the Camera that Displaced the Camera

Snapchat’s Camera versus Apple’s Camera

Some great points in Jonathan Wegener’s post above. I especially like the concept of “upstreaming” — the person who stands in front of you hailing a taxi to grab the taxi first is one of the worst people in the world (at the very least, have the decency to walk a couple blocks up, out of sight of the original hailer, like I used to do — or did before Uber solved this in a much better way).

In the digital world, this concept has happened to SMS with services like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, etc. Those guys got “out in front” of SMS. But I’m not entirely sure it will be the exact same situation with the camera because remember that a large part of the reason why SMS was circumvented was because of the ridiculous fees carriers imposed upon it. The camera app has no such fees.

But Wegener is correct in that one of the major issues the camera app has is its use of storage space on the device on which it resides. I also have a number of friends and family who were shocked when they could no longer use their camera because they had no more storage available.

Yes, the rumored 32GB entry-level iPhone will alleviate some of this. But perhaps not for a couple years, as the same type of people who run into storage issues may be the ones least likely to upgrade to the latest-and-greatest. And, at the end of the day, with things like Live Photos and the rumored new dual-lens camera, the images themselves keep getting larger and larger. Not to mention video. Especially 4K video. 32GB also won’t be enough for many people faster than they think.

To that end, I often wonder why someone hasn’t built the perfect “cloud camera.” That is, a camera that doesn’t store any pictures on your device but simply saves them all in the cloud right when you take them. I know it’s not a simple thing to do — what if there is no connection, or a poor one, etc — but I think a lot of people in certain markets would want something like this.

Then I realized: that’s essentially what Snapchat is now.

It wasn’t always, due to the ephemeral focus of the product. And that was my number one hold up in using it — the fact that it wasn’t seamless to save your images in perpetuity. Now, with “Memories” you can do just that (though, playing with it for a few days, it’s still a little more convoluted than I’d like — you have to manually save a photo to add it to your Memories, unless you toggle on “Auto-Save Stories” in Settings, which isn’t on by default, for example).

I also have some issues with the quality of the photos taken in Snapchat (this would seem to be because the app is actually using the video functionality to capture an image rather than the camera itself — and there’s likely a good reason for this, for now). But as Wegener notes, I’m likely weird in this regard. For most people, “good enough” is good enough.

And that’s not just the core young demographic which has been the key to Snapchat’s rise. It’s also older demographics, which will lead to its growth going forward. Generally speaking, it’s probably safe to assume that across all demographics, people care more about simplicity and something always working versus quality. Quality is a nice-to-have.

And so I think that with the addition of Memories, Snapchat does have a real shot of becoming the new de-facto camera for many people. But getting it to be the de-factro camera for most people seems a bit pie-in-the-sky. Remember, Apple is always keenly aware of the importance of photography for their devices — the iPhone is now the most popular camera in the world by a large margin. And the second most popular is another model of the iPhone. And the 3rd most popular, another model. Etc.

With iOS 10, the camera is likely to be even more front-and-center — well, technically, front-and-to-the-right. That is, rather than the slide-up-from-the-right-corner on the lock screen camera shortcut we now have, which is pretty finicky, we’ll all have access to the camera simply by swiping to the left (revealing the camera ready-to-go to the right of the main screen). This should be both a much more straight-forward and much faster way to get to the camera starting this fall.

But that will only be Apple’s default camera app, of course. While I wish Apple would open this up to third party apps — like Snapchat! — they haven’t yet, and I suspect they won’t ever do anything to displace that core camera funtionality. Because again, it’s so vital to what the iPhone is now.

Anyway, I’m incredibly bullish on Snapchat and think Memories is the logical step to take it to the proverbial next level. A next level that will make it the go-to camera for even more people in even more demographics. But I also don’t expect Apple to cede the default camera status for most people any time soon.

Android on the other hand…