Snapchat borrows features from TikTok as it launches “Lens Challenges”

Snapchat, a company that has witnessed many of its features being ripped off by Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook has now started to do the same as it copies TikTok to stay relevant to modern trends.

“Lens Challenge”, a feature directly inspired by TikTok, lets users share their lip syncing videos with their friends. Challenges can be accessed from Lens Explorer section in the app. At the moment the app has a holiday special lens that lets you lip sync with Gwen Stefani’s “Jingle Bells.” Once the video is recorded, users can send it to Challenge story if they want their story to get featured.

Snapchat will allow its community to make more challenges and be more creative with it. The challenges can be viewed by everyone given that they are public as the user can also make their challenges private restricting them to their friends.
TikTok is a new social app that lets you record songs, dance, lip sync challenges and more of such activities and share it with the world. The app has seen massive success and gained quite a following with teenagers. In fact, it surpassed Facebook and Snapchat in new downloads last month. The company behind TikTok had recently acquired musical.ly which has resulted in a wider user base.

Snapchat is under immense pressure as it tries to stay relevant in the online social world. It has faced constant competition from Facebook and its various services. The Snapchat redesign didn’t help them either. In fact, Snapchat lost over 2 million users in just Q3.

Snapchat isn’t the only company that has copied TikTok. Facebook launched their own version of TikTok called Lasso. Youtube has also seen many videos with similar concepts. It will be interesting to see how TikTok one-ups its competitors as they play catch up.