(Updated at 6:27 PM ET with comments from the company.)
Want to save those immortal but evaporating Snapchats? Or want to use Snapchat on a PC?
While enormously popular, those brilliant and/or hot Snapchat videos and photos you and others have sent are as ephemeral as smoke and only available via a mobile device. Several apps have sprung up to overcome both hindrances — and to allow you to save what the sender thought was cast to the wind. (Oh, you devil.)
For example, a recently released, free app offers both. Saver for Snapchat (PC), available for Windows machines, is intended to allow use of the Android and iOS app on a PC. (The company said a Mac version is planned for Q3 of this year.) While there are other workarounds, such as installing and running an Android emulator on a PC, the regular Snapchat is usable only as a mobile app.
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Instead of losing those great moments in photos and videos, Saver for Snapchat promises to allow the photos and videos sent to Snapchat to be saved, edited, and viewed — and to “stop Snapchat from deleting your treasured photos from your friend.”
A spokesperson for Snapchat told VentureBeat that, while they were not aware of this specific app, they are “aware of apps like it generally.”
“Our Terms of Use prohibit accessing the Snapchat API with an unauthorized or third-party client,” the spokesperson noted. She added that, “in order to protect the safety and security of their account, Snapchat users should never enter their passwords anywhere other than our support website or the official Snapchat application.”
Daniel Offer, creator of Saver for Snapchat (PC), told us that his app “communicates directly through the Snapchat servers, [so] no password or user details are stored or interfered with.” He added that the app does not use the Snapchat API.
The Snapchat app itself has the capability to download and save a photo if it’s been added to My Story. Or a user can take a screenshot, but the sender will get an alert. Although there are ways around the alert.
Of course, there’s also Facebook’s anti-Snapchat app, Slingshot, which allows users to turn on the automatic saving of videos and images to the camera roll.
