Still, many of the product executives at these companies acknowledge<br />that some of their updates are not entirely original and give credit to Snapchat for creating a new kind of “format.”<br />In an interview in August, Kevin Systrom, a founder and the chief executive of Instagram, did not mention Snapchat by name but acknowledged<br />that “other companies deserve all the credit” for popularizing disappearing photos and videos<br />Making the camera the focus — unlike competitors, Snapchat makes it the first thing you see after opening the app — allows<br />people to send images much faster than with other apps, which often require two or three steps to open the camera.<br />Snapchat’s users send more than 2.5 billion messages and images each day, according to the company’s initial public offering prospectus.<br />After reports of a decline in photo-sharing inside its app, Instagram began making changes to keep users coming back and sharing more photos.<br />Avoiding any direct mention of Snapchat, he added, “We don’t really think about building things for other reasons.”<br />Investors have been grousing about how unprofitable Snap is and how its number of users appears small.<br />In August, Instagram introduced a Stories feature that was a near exact copy of Snapchat’s.
