Still, many of the product executives at these companies acknowledge
that some of their updates are not entirely original and give credit to Snapchat for creating a new kind of “format.”
In an interview in August, Kevin Systrom, a founder and the chief executive of Instagram, did not mention Snapchat by name but acknowledged
that “other companies deserve all the credit” for popularizing disappearing photos and videos
Making the camera the focus — unlike competitors, Snapchat makes it the first thing you see after opening the app — allows
people to send images much faster than with other apps, which often require two or three steps to open the camera.
Snapchat’s users send more than 2.5 billion messages and images each day, according to the company’s initial public offering prospectus.
After reports of a decline in photo-sharing inside its app, Instagram began making changes to keep users coming back and sharing more photos.
Avoiding any direct mention of Snapchat, he added, “We don’t really think about building things for other reasons.”
Investors have been grousing about how unprofitable Snap is and how its number of users appears small.
In August, Instagram introduced a Stories feature that was a near exact copy of Snapchat’s.