The holidays are a great time to hang out with friends and spend time with family – it’s always better together! We couldn’t think of a better time to announce Groups, a new way to communicate with up to 16 friends on Snapchat.

Groups can be created while sending a Snap, or when you’re making a new Chat. When your friends are present in a Group Chat, we show their name at the bottom of the Chat. Simply tap their name to start a 1:1 Chat, and then easily return to the Group in one swipe! We call this Quick Chat, and it’s the fastest way to keep the conversation going with one friend without spamming the entire Group.

Chats sent to a Group are deleted by default after 24 hours. Snaps sent to a Group can be opened and replayed just once by each recipient. If a Snap isn't opened, it's deleted after 24 hours, just like Chats.

We’ve also introduced two new Creative Tools – Scissors and Paintbrush. Use Scissors to cut out part of a Snap on the Preview Screen to turn it into a sticker! The Paintbrush can be applied to Snaps in Memories, and turns a Snap into an artistic masterpiece!

We’re so grateful for your support. Thank you for another terrific year – we love building products for all of you! Wishing you a wonderful 2017.

Merry Snapping,

Team Snap

When we first built Auto Advance we wanted to make it easier to catch up with your friends by playing all of your Stories in recent updates back-to-back.

Unfortunately, this change made it impossible to individually choose which Story to watch. Sometimes we just want to see what our close friends or family are up to – not all of our friends – and Auto Advance prevented that.

Starting today for select Snapchatters in our Android community and rolling out soon across all Android and iOS, the Auto Advance feature will be removed to give you control of your Story viewing experience once again!

Simply tap on a Story to view it. We won’t automatically advance you to the next Story in recent updates.

We haven’t given up entirely on this idea of making it easier to catch up with friends – so we took what we learned from Auto Advance and built Story Playlist.

Story Playlist is an easy way to select the Stories you want to watch and seamlessly view them full screen in the order you selected them.

Tap on the Story thumbnail to the left of your friend’s name to add their Story to your playlist. Hit the play button at the bottom of the screen to watch!

Happy Snapping!

Team Snapchat

We’ve been working for the past few years to develop a totally new type of camera. We call it Spectacles!

Imagine one of your favorite memories. What if you could go back and see that memory the way you experienced it? That’s why we built Spectacles.

Spectacles are sunglasses with an integrated video camera that makes it easy to create Memories.

We’ve created one of the smallest wireless video cameras in the world, capable of taking a day’s worth of Snaps on a single charge, and we integrated it seamlessly into a fun pair of sunglasses – available in 3 different colors!

Spectacles connect directly to Snapchat via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi and transfer your Memories directly into the app in our brand new circular video format.

Circular video plays full screen on any device, in any orientation, and captures the human perspective with a 115 degree field of view. We can’t wait for you to see it!

Spectacles will be available soon.

Happy Snapping!

Team Snap

Today we are changing the name of our company to Snap Inc.

It has been five years since Bobby and I started working on Picaboo, the little app that became Snapchat – and we’ve been so lucky to build an incredible team that has continued to expand upon Snapchat and create products like Stories, Memories, Lenses, and so much more!

When we were just getting started it made sense to name our company Snapchat Inc., because Snapchat was our only product! Now that we are developing other products, like Spectacles, we need a name that goes beyond just one product – but doesn’t lose the familiarity and fun of our team and brand.

We decided to drop the “chat” and go with Snap Inc!

Changing our name also has another benefit: when you search for our products it will be easier to find relevant product information rather than boring company information or financial analysis. You can search Snapchat or Spectacles for the fun stuff and leave Snap Inc. for the Wall Street crowd :)

We hope that this change will improve your experience with Snapchat and Spectacles, and create a structure that allows us to continue making great new products for you and your friends!

Evan

Today we’re excited to introduce Geostickers! Geostickers are special stickers available in some of the biggest cities around the world — send them in Chat or stick them on Snaps!

Geostickers are available now in Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Washington DC, Honolulu, London, Sydney, São Paulo, Paris, and Riyadh. You’ll need to have your location services enabled to see them!

Happy Snapping!

Memories is a new way to save Snaps and Stories on Snapchat. It’s a personal collection of your favorite moments that lives below the Camera screen. Just swipe up from the Camera to open Memories!

It’s super easy to find the Snap or Story you’re looking for in just a few seconds by typing keywords like “dog” or “Hawaii” — that way you can spend less time searching and more time enjoying your Memories.

You can use Memories to create new Stories from Snaps you’ve taken, or even combine different Stories into a longer narrative! It’s fun to celebrate an anniversary or birthday by finding a few old Snaps and stringing them together into a new Story :)

We’ve also created a new way to send Snaps from Memories to your friends, or even post them to your Story. If you post a Snap you took more than a day ago to your Story, it will appear with a frame around it so that everyone knows it’s from the past.

We realized that Snapchatters want to feel comfortable showing their Memories to friends while they’re hanging out together, so we made it easy to move Snaps and Stories to My Eyes Only — and avoid awkward moments when a friend stumbles upon a Snap meant just for you.

Memories is backed up by Snapchat. We won’t backup any photos or videos from your Camera Roll, unless you use one to make a new Story or add it to My Eyes Only. In that case, we’ll back up only the photo or video that you used.

We’ll be rolling out Memories selectively over the next month or so — it’s a big change for our service so we want to make sure everything is running smoothly! You’ll receive a Chat from Team Snapchat when Memories is ready for you to use.

Happy Snapping!

When we first launched Chat, our goal was to emulate the best parts of face-to-face conversation. Chat 1.0 was all about the joys of being here — when most apps told you when your friend was typing, Chat let you know that your friend was listening. Two years later, we’ve learned a ton about how people talk, but our goal remains unchanged. We want Chat to be the best way to communicate — second only to hanging out face-to-face.

Today, we’re excited to introduce Chat 2.0. You can start by sending a few chats, and when your friend shows up, start talking or video chatting instantly with one tap. Your friend can simply listen if you want to sing them a song, or watch if you have a new puppy to show them. If they aren’t there, you can quickly send an audio note to say what you mean. And sometimes, a sticker says it best :)

What we love most about the new Chat is how easily you can transition between all these ways of communicating — just like you do in person. When that’s possible, you aren’t texting, calling, or video chatting… you’re just talking. We’ve been working on this redesign for a while — we can’t wait to hear what you think!

We’re also introducing Auto-Advance Stories, the fastest way to catch up with your friends. When you finish a Story, the next one begins automatically — simply swipe to skip ahead, or pull down to exit!

Lastly, we’re refreshing our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, making some things clearer, and building foundations for awesome new products to come. Check out our new Privacy Center for more on that!

Happy Snapping!

Team Snapchat

Over 100 million people use Snapchat every day because they feel free to have fun and express themselves. We take the security and privacy of all that self expression seriously. That’s why we’ve filed a legal brief today supporting Apple in its dispute with the FBI.

At the heart of this dispute is a locked iPhone linked to Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the terrorists behind the San Bernardino terror attack. The FBI cannot unlock the iPhone without engineering assistance from Apple, so it got a court order telling Apple to write new iOS code to create a “backdoor” into the phone.

That means a single federal judge has conscripted Apple’s engineers into hacking its own software. Never before has the government asserted—let alone been granted—such a sweeping power to dictate how private companies must design (or dismantle) their own products.

But the concerns here go far beyond any one company’s freedom to engineer its products. The real danger with this ruling is the threat it poses to the security of your information and communications. Here at Snapchat, people trust us to send their content in a way that helps them feel free to be themselves. If a court were to suddenly demand that we re-engineer our products to preserve every Snap that’s ever sent, our service wouldn’t be the same. That’s why we’re standing with Apple.

We want to make very clear that we condemn the unspeakable evil committed in San Bernardino, and extend our bottomless sympathies to the victims and their families. Snapchat has zero regard for terrorists or any other criminals. And we prove it by cooperating with law enforcement when we get lawful requests for assistance. In the first six months of 2015 alone, we processed more than 750 subpoenas, court orders, search warrants, and other legal requests. You can find all the details in our transparency report.

But there’s a big difference between giving the government information we have and being forced to redesign our products to allow access that no one currently has. If one judge can force Apple to create a backdoor into its phone, another judge could make us breach our data protections too.

There’s something else that really bothers us about this ruling. The only basis the government could come up with for this expansive new power was a statute that was passed in 1789. That’s not a typo. A law written more than 220 years ago by the very first Congress—a body of legislators that could scarcely imagine phones, much less smart phones—is the one and only justification for the government’s bold bid to circumvent the democratic process.

There’s an important conversation that we as a nation need to have about how to balance the undeniably important interests in national security with the equally important interests in preserving the privacy and security of personal information. We welcome that conversation. But it’s one that should take place as these things usually do: through democratic exchanges before Congress. Allowing a single judge to impose radical new mandates on tech companies is not the right way to resolve these important debates.

It’s time for lawmakers, businesses, and consumers to have an honest conversation about whether the government should be able to tell businesses how they should design their products.

Evan Spiegel

We’re a company that takes privacy and security seriously. So it’s with real remorse–and embarrassment–that one of our employees fell for a phishing scam and revealed some payroll information about our employees. The good news is that our servers were not breached, and our users’ data was totally unaffected by this. The bad news is that a number of our employees have now had their identity compromised. And for that, we’re just impossibly sorry.

Here’s what happened: Last Friday, Snapchat’s payroll department was targeted by an isolated email phishing scam in which a scammer impersonated our Chief Executive Officer and asked for employee payroll information. Unfortunately, the phishing email wasn’t recognized for what it was–a scam–and payroll information about some current and former employees was disclosed externally. To be perfectly clear though: None of our internal systems were breached, and no user information was accessed.

Needless to say, we responded swiftly and aggressively. Within four hours of this incident, we confirmed that the phishing attack was an isolated incident and reported it to the FBI. We began sorting through which employees–current and past–may have been affected. And we have since contacted the affected employees and have offered them two years of free identity-theft insurance and monitoring.

When something like this happens, all you can do is own up to your mistake, take care of the people affected, and learn from what went wrong. To make good on that last point, we will redouble our already rigorous training programs around privacy and security in the coming weeks. Our hope is that we never have to write a blog post like this again.

Team Snapchat