Snapchat Launches Native iPad App

Snapchat has quietly launched a native iPad app today. As a mobile-first social network, Snapchat offered a lackluster experience on the iPad as users could only use the crippled web app or the iPhone version of Snapchat, which doesn’t take advantage of the bigger screen.

The company mentioned the new iPad layout in the latest update for its iOS app (via 9to5Mac). “Snapchat now offers native support for iPad,” the company said. “This means that Snapchat will fill an iPad’s full screen, providing you with a larger canvas when capturing Snaps and allowing you to see more friends on the 2nd and 4th tabs.”

Despite an audience of 800 million monthly active users and 11 million subscribers to its Snapchat+ service, it took no less than 13 years for Snapchat to release a native iPad app. Instagram, which has an even bigger audience of over 2 billion active users monthly, has still not released an iPad app despite Apple’s latest iPads offering excellent cameras. And again, you don’t get the full set of feature if you use Instagram on the web.

Even though Apple claims to have over 1.8 million apps on its App Store, there are still some high-profile omissions on the iPad. I mentioned Instagram before, but WhatsApp is another good example. A new iPad version of WhatsApp launched in beta a year ago, but it still hasn’t been released to the public. It’s really strange coming from companies with an enormous amount of resources.

In some way, Apple has also been neglecting its iPad users over the years: The company waited until 2022 to release its basic Weather app on iPadOS 16. Later this fall, iPadOS 18 will finally bring Apple’s Calculator app to the tablet OS.