Snapchat is a popular application for mobile devices that automatically sends and deletes a picture of video from the recipient's phone as soon as they've looked at it for more than 10 seconds. The app allows the user to draw on the photos in various colors and leave brief text captions on them as well.
In addition, it sends a notification to the sender if the person who received the image takes a screen cap of it to save to their phone. As of Saturday, the team at Snapchat has decided to try something new.
"Team Snapchat has been growing by leaps and bounds this month," the company said in a blog post announcing its latest feature, "SnapKidz." "The arrival of summer has brought with it summer engineering interns and other new members of the team. We're excited to be picking up the pace of development!
"As you may know, Snapchat is for teens and adults- children under the age of 13 are not allowed to create accounts. The previous iOS update introduced age-gating, in which we asked people their age on the registration screen and didn't allow them to proceed if the age entered was under 13," the company wrote. "This was a pretty standard way of handling things, but it didn't provide a very good experience. So now, in addition to age-gating, we've decided to try something a little different."
Snapchat was so popular amongst youths that the company deemed it fit to release a version just for kids. The new SnapKidz allows those under 13 to take snaps, caption them and draw on the. However, rather than sending them after that, they are saved to the person's mobile device. They are not permitted to send or receive snaps nor can they add friends.
Right now, SnapKidz is only available on iOS. If it does well the company plans to include it in an upcoming Android update.
