Snapkidz: Weird, Boring Snapchat for Children

Snapchat, the app geared towards sexting teens turned social media phenomenon, has become the go-to carrier of all burn-after-reading messages for The Youth of Today. Hell, people’s grandmas are even snapchatting XXX shots of their casseroles. (That’s not even a euphemism for anything sexually explicit — I’ve personally witnessed someone’s grandmother snapchat a photo of a casserole to their granddaughter.) The app just closed a $60 million round of venture capital funding, so hopefully this means they’ll feed the hungry masses of snapchatters some better colors for us to draw unicorn horns on our faces (seriously, the Snapchat color selection is very limiting).

Despite thousands of users utilizing the app primarily for non-explicit content, Snapchat is still associated with boob shots that disappear in 2 seconds — which is why the app’s new kid-friendly version, Snapkidz, seems like a rather odd idea. Snapkidz is geared towards kids under the age of 13, but instead of being able to send snapchats to other people — the entire concept behind the original app — kids are limited to drawing on the photos and saving them to their iPhones, because they’re children and children own iPhones now.

From the Snapchat blog:

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. 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.

Right, but if a 12-year-old wanted to use the “adult” version of the app, all they have to do is lie during the registration process. It seems like Snapchat is trying to get ahead of the allegations that the app allows for underage users to send nudie photos, but this doesn’t seem like an effective way of doing so. Without the feature of being able to send photos to other people, the app itself is kind of boring, especially when users can’t decorate their photos purikura-style. What is more deplorable, though, is that this means an entire generation of children will learn to take selfies before they hit puberty, and that is something this world could do without.