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June 17, 2020 12:02 am

Snapchat Firm Unveils Platform Plan To Take On Google and Apple

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Snap, the company behind Snapchat, has revealed plans for a fully fledged digital platform taking on not only Facebook but also Google and Apple. The company is launching an app store, expanding its games platform and offering the facility for external developers to upload machine-learning models to build augmented reality experiences. It is allowing other apps to integrate its camera software for the first time, and incorporating businesses into its maps alongside users' friends. The features announced by Snap at its annual developer summit, held virtually last week, are the early stage of that revolution. One series of tools, called Scan, let users identify plants, trees and dogs by pointing their camera at them. A planned integration with Yuka, a dieting app, will offer a similar function for packaged foods. Another new product lets developers build their own AI filters for cameras. Initially, the tool will probably be used to generate ever more inventive lenses for the company's messaging product -- examples already include a filter that turns a video into the style of Van Gogh's Starry Night, and a simple hand-tracking tool that places stars at your fingertips. [T]he goal is that eventually creativity will expand to include utility. In Snap's vision of the future, its camera platform replaces the home screen of a smartphone or the newsfeed of Facebook as the default starting point from where all other tasks begin. New AR technology is one way to achieve that, but another is getting more apps into the camera, and its camera in more apps. The latter is achieved by CameraKit, which lets other applications replace their default camera with Snapchat's. The idea is that there is mutual benefit: the app doesn't have to build a fully featured camera function if it just wants to include the ability to take or send photos, while Snapchat's camera platform becomes increasingly valuable to developers who might be on the fence about whether to build features for it. For the former, Snap launched Minis, a feature that allows for micro-apps to be embedded within SnapChat, which can be opened without installation.

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