Earlier, Snapchat and Instagram had two different but very similar audiences. Now, the latter has cloned and built upon the features cloned from the former to attract the masses towards its photo & video platform — a strategy which has worked wonders. Instagram Stories now has more daily active users as compared to Snapchat, thus, leading to a downgrade in the total number of installs for the ephemeral messaging app.
According to a report released by Sensor Tower, the number of installs for Snapchat, which is immensely popular among Gen X and Gen Z, has decreased by about 16 percent year-over-year in the month of April 2017. This includes the total worldwide installs on the Google Play Store, as well as the iOS App Store. The total installations amassed by Snapchat in the previous month stood at over 21.1 million, compared to 25.2 million for April 2016.
Due to its prevailing photo+video-centric approach, Instagram captures the interest of most age groups and has amassed a whopping 31 million installs in the month of April. Led by Stories and revamped messaging features, Instagram’s installs increased by from 26.1 million — a 19 percent increase in the user base from last year. This is completely opposite to that of Snapchat and shows that at least one Facebook-owned app’s ‘Stories’ integration is going strong and growing.
This data collected by the intelligence firm falls in line with the company’s appalling quarterly earnings report. It confirms that Snap is having a tough time keeping up with the newly added competitor, which cloned its feature set about six months ago. Instagram has now moved 10 million installs per month ahead of Snapchat while the scenario was opposite for the steadily growing Snapchat app. It has further predicted that:
Looking beyond April, downloads for Snapchat declined further as it entered the second month of Q2. Between May 1 and May 10, 2017, Snapchat was installed about 6.2 million times across both stores, a 28 percent decrease from 8.6 million during the same period in 2016.
Snapchat had managed to attract millennials with its quirky face masks and filters, a strategy Facebook has adopted aggressively — building a full AR stack to beat Snapchat at its own game. The social media giant unveiled its Camera Effects platform for developers to build experiences and augment the reality using just the smartphone’s camera, which is now one of the most powerful tools in the 21st century.
As for Snap, the company is not only having a hard time sustaining growth of its ephemeral messaging app but is Spectacles hardware product is also not off to a bombastic start. It was a one time wonder and people are starting to forget about the colorful, funky video recording spectacles. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, however, believes that Snap Inc is still high on creativity and has what it needs to trump Facebook in the social space.
