Snapchat has announced that it will start letting people change their usernames soon.
The company says in an email that it’s “excited to share that starting February 23, all Snapchatters across iOS and Android will be able to change their username without any impact on their friends list, Snap code, Snap score, memories, etc.” as a result.
It can be hard to pick a username. Some people use their real names for every account they create, others come up with a pseudonym they use across multiple sites, and still others go by whatever seems appropriate for the platform in question. There’s no right answer.
There are definitely wrong answers, though, and even a name that seems fine at first can become problematic. (Just ask the company formerly known as Isis Mobile Wallet.) Snapchat previously forced users to either deal with having terrible names or create new accounts.
Snapchat acknowledges this (albeit in nicer terms) in its email. “As an app built around ephemerality,” it says, “we know that people grow and change–we certainly have over the last ten years–and we couldn’t be more excited to bring this top requested feature to Snapchatters.”
Here’s the company’s breakdown of the username changing process:
- Tap the Bitmoji icon in the top-left corner of the Camera to head to the profile screen.
- Select settings by tapping on the gear icon in the top right corner of the profile.
- Tap “Username,” just below Name, and select “Change Username” marked in blue.
- From there, click continue on the pop-up reminding that Usernames can only be changed once per year.
- Type in a new Username, and hit next to finalize!
This probably won’t make a huge difference in day-to-day use, and one could argue that Snapchat usernames shouldn’t have been permanent in the first place, but at least now people won’t be stuck with the not-so-clever usernames they picked when they signed up a decade ago.
