Snapchat Finally Lands on the iPad
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Some of the most popular iPhone apps have taken a surprisingly long time to reach the iPad — despite both devices running virtually identical operating systems. An iPad version of WhatsApp didn’t arrive until last year, nearly 15 years after the iPhone version launched, while Meta’s other social network, Instagram, refuses to embrace the iPad.
However, Meta’s properties haven’t been alone in their insistence that mobile experiences mean iPhone-only. The Popular social app Snapchat has also been stuck on the iPhone for 13 years. Sure, you could use the iPhone app on your iPad, but that’s a suboptimal experience at best.
Thankfully for Snapchat fans, it appears the company has seen the light. Yesterday, Snap quietly released an update that brings native iPad support to the platform, heralding the new big-screen support in an update note:
Snapchat now offers native support for iPad! 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. It’s still the same Snapchat you know and love, but this time on the big screen!
The update ensures that Snapchat users can now take full advantage of the iPad’s larger screen. In addition to looking generally ugly, running the iPhone version of Snapchat on an iPad left black borders around the iPhone version since the iPhone and iPad don’t share the same screen aspect ratio. Users were left either running a smaller iPhone-sized app on the bigger screen or zooming it in for a more kludgy, pixelated view.
Still, it’s not all sunshine and roses. Snapchat for iPad has a few limitations, chief of which is that it’s limited to portrait mode. If you like to use your iPad in landscape orientation, such as with a keyboard, you’ll be left looking sideways at Snapchat.
Since Snapchat for iPad is the same universal app as the iPhone version, the experience will be familiar to Snapchat fans. All the same features are there, just bigger and crisper for the 11-to-13-inch screens of today’s iPads. You can capture videos and photos with the built-in cameras and share them immediately, just as you can with the iPhone app, but if you’re running the latest M4 iPad Pro, images you receive will be displayed in their full 2752-by-2064-pixel glory on Apple’s gorgeous Tandem OLED display.
Snapchat landed on the App Store for the iPhone in 2011, over a year after the iPad was released. However, Snap conspicuously snubbed Apple’s tablet at the time, and it wasn’t long before Snapchat fans gave up hope that they’d ever see an optimized version for the larger screen. Granted, the company may have felt the iPad market wasn’t big enough, especially for an app that’s primarily focused on selfies (and it wouldn’t be alone in this opinion), but even for those who aren’t hardcore Snapchatters, it’s nice to see another app embracing Apple’s tablet.
Snapchat is now available on the App Store for both the iPhone and iPad. iPad users will need to run iPadOS 13.0 or later; however, that encompasses every iPad model released since 2015, all of which can be updated to at least iPadOS 15.
