Snapchat has been on a tear of actually good ideas of late. (Well, almost all of them good. That whole “We’re relaunching Spectacles even though we lost $40 million on them last time” thing seems less than inspired.) The company tweaked the Snap Map, its location-based map feature that shows where your friends are in real time, to be more private. You can now tag other users in your Snap Stories. Creators are finally getting the analytics they’ve been asking for since the very beginning of the app. And now, according to a report from TechCrunch, the app is getting ready to launch a new developer platform called Snapkit. Which, if you’re reading this and saying, “I’m not a developer, why do I care?” — hear me out. Snapkit would reportedly let other apps give users the option to log in to those apps using an existing Snapchat account.
Facebook has largely cornered the market on this. Think about all the different apps you’ve clicked to log in to using your Facebook account. Tinder is a good example. (Though, there was that time Facebook changed its privacy policies and locked everyone out of their Tinder accounts, which was bad … but moving right along.) In the post–Cambridge Analytica era, it might be nice to have another option for an easy log-in that isn’t Facebook, or alternatively, you having to make a new, specific account for every new app you download or platform you join.
This, of course, would open Snap up to a whole bunch of new potential breach dangers, but to its credit, the platform has kept its nose relatively clean in the past when it comes to user data and privacy. And, of course, all of this is still, according to TechCrunch, in the works. So we’ll see what actually happens. But a world where I can use my Snapchat account to log in to other things, instead of using my Facebook account, sounds pretty good to me. And I’d imagine, given the platform’s struggling numbers, that it sounds pretty good to Snap, too.
