Snapchat has decided to make chatting more interesting by introducing the ability to launch lightweight utilities apps from within the Chat section.
As TechCrunch reports, Snapchat decided to call this new feature Minis and put together the video below to show us how it works:
The apps are accessible via a keyboard tab and designed to work without meeding to switch away from the chat you’re having with friends. Once opened, they take up the whole screen for you to quickly achieve a task. What tasks are available depends on the developers and services who sign on to use Minis.
The video gives us a good idea what Snapchat wants to achieve with Minis. It’s a one-stop shop for booking movie or music festival tickets, signing up to vote, testing yourself on learning a new language, or doing some quick breathing exercises to stay calm. It’s a way of achieving all those little tasks you would otherwise forget to do, or put off until later because it means loading up a separate app.
Snapchat users don’t need to worry about a huge library of mostly terrible Minis apps appearing. Snapchat is apparently curating the process and hand-picking which Minis make it on to the service. For now, we can expect just seven Minis apps to appear next month including Coachella, Headspace, Atom, Let’s Do it, Prediction Master, Saturn, and Tembo. Developers interested in creating Minis need to sign up to the developer program called Snap Kit.
