Blog
Innovation

Innovation
GPU Transcoding at Scale
By
on Tuesday, March 23, 2021
We strive to make Snapchat the fastest way to communicate and share a moment. In doing so, we constantly juggle the trade offs between quality and application performance when creating, posting and viewing media.
Dev Tools

Dev Tools
A Developer Ecosystem for Snapchat
By
on Wednesday, February 3, 2021
Building a successful developer ecosystem is about unlocking win-win opportunities for Snapchatters and our developer partners. Providing value to both of these groups is critical for a thriving, healthy and successful community. Snap Kit provides developers with access to powerful features with thoughtful controls to keep our users safe.
Performance

Performance
Measuring ‘Time to Camera ready’
By
on Wednesday, January 6, 2021
When a user opens the Snapchat app, the first experience they are exposed to is the camera. This is key to ensure our users can capture the moment and communicate as fast as possible. To measure and optimize this experience, we measure the time a user presses the Snapchat app icon on their home screen, to the time that the camera is ready to take a snap.
Privacy

Privacy
Privacy at Snap
By
on Wednesday, December 2, 2020
At Snap, we have always made privacy a top priority. From the get go, we designed and engineered our products to collect and store very little information about the lives of our customers. Snapchat has demonstrated a focus on privacy through the ephemeral nature of its content, offering end-to-end encryption for one-to-one Snaps, and keeping the friend list private by default. By providing a private and safe platform, we advance our mission to “empower people to express themselves, live in the moment, . . . and have fun together.”
Android

Android
Shipping Two Apps in One on Android
By
on Monday, July 27, 2020
We knew early on that rebuilding the app is only half the battle - releasing a stable app that doesn’t regress any of our business metrics is as big of a challenge (if not bigger). Therefore, we needed to start testing the app with some of our users very early on in the process. We came up with following set of requirement for our release plan:
Machine Learning

Machine Learning
Device-Distributed Machine Learning
By
on Wednesday, July 8, 2020
Snapchat uses machine learning to power many features across the app - from sophisticated lenses, to serving relevant and interesting Discover content, to returning relevant search results, to security architecture that keeps our community safe.
Android

Android
Making The Most of a Rewrite
By
on Wednesday, June 24, 2020
As Part 1 of this series highlights, over time, Snapchat grew to be a complex app with dozens of large and disjointed features. As our app grew, we saw each feature fighting for resources in a spiraling “tragedy of the commons," resulting in a sluggish experience across much of the app. Too many features were running too much work at app startup time so they could load a bit faster if and when they are used. While this may help a particular feature load faster, every other feature loads slower as a result.
Culture

Culture
Kindness in engineering
By
on Wednesday, May 20, 2020
At Snap, we believe that kindness is at the heart of engineering: we place a high value on integrity, craftsmanship, and collaboration in all of our work. We also recognize that kindness without courage is not always enough: successful companies should foster healthy internal debate, driving positive change.

Don't Rewrite Your App, Unless You Have To
By
on Thursday, May 7, 2020
Rewrites can have positive results, but they are challenging. In order to develop our strategy, we researched our app’s performance thoroughly before starting. Once we began, a tremendous amount of coordination and support was needed to keep the project on track, and we used and tested our new app from early on to keep the quality high. In this post, we outline some of our decision making processes and lessons learned from the experience.
Product Design

Product Design
Meet Snap’s Design Engineers
By
on Wednesday, April 22, 2020
At Snap, we’ve been able to maintain our ability to move fast and think creatively thanks to our unique team structure.