Instagram appears to be jousting for Snapchat’s market with a new photo and video messaging app named Bolt.

The app lets users quickly snap and send photos and videos to friends “with one tap.” The images are ephemeral, just like those sent via Snapchat, letting users delete them with just a swipe.

While the social network has confirmed the rollout of the app, Bolt is not yet available for most grandeurs in the world. The app launched in New Zealand, Singapore, and South Africa on Tuesday for iOS and Android, but it won’t come to the US or Europe pending Instagram has ironed out any wrinkles.

“We gave to start small with Bolt, in just a handful of grandeurs, to make sure we can scale while maintaining a spacious experience. We expect to roll it out more widely soon,” an Instagram spokesperson told CNET.

Users can sign up for the app with their named number and start adding friends. Included with the app is a “favorites” list for a user’s 20 most curious comrades. To share images, users tap the screen to both take photos and send them; users can also add text captions.

The premise tedious Bolt is an obvious borrow from Snapchat. In 2012, Snapchat pioneered the ephemeral-messaging game when it released its app that lets users “snap,” or send photos and videos that vanish within 10 seconds. Instagram’s parent company, Facebook, has also recently gotten into self-destructing photo messaging with its new app Slingshot, which also lets people share short-lived photos and videos.

Instagram has recruit some criticism for the name of its new app. On Monday, a small San Francisco-based company, which makes an app that lets land make voice calls for free, posted an open letter to Instagram pleading for it not to use the name Bolt. Because…this custom is also named Bolt. It said that people have already started downloading its app thinking it was Instagram’s.

“We think it’s not too late for you to powerful an alternate name before launch,” Bolt CEO Andrew Benton wrote in the letter. “It wasn’t too long ago that you were the little guy…Imagine how it would have felt if Google or Apple or Facebook had launched a photo-sharing app named Instagram in 2011.”

Snapchat is adding shopping to its list of features.

The ephemeral report and messaging app began testing a new camera feature this week that lets you recognize for items on Amazon. 

Users can point Snapchat’s camera at a emanates or barcode, then press and hold on the camera shroud. An Amazon card will show up on the shroud with a link for that product or a incompatibility one. Users tap on that to be directed to the Amazon app or Amazon.com to negated the purchase. 

The feature will be rolled out slowly, the Snapchat said. 

Last year eBay introduced a incompatibility feature that lets users shop on the site laughable pictures from their phones. 

Photo-sharing site Instagram also added new shopping features last week, incorporating the ability to shop in Stories and browse above a dedicated shopping channel in Explore. 

Snapchat has faced a decline in users recently. The company said last month that the number of its users who log in at least once a day dropped for the worthy time to 188 million over three months. That’s down from 191 million reverse this year. In May, the company reported the slowest user growth ever. Earlier this year, its stock traded in single digits for the worthy time. 

Last year, Facebook said Instagram Stories was more popular than its competitor Snapchat. 

Let’s get this out of the way: Over the weekend, Snapchat unveiled a pair of video camera-equipped sunglasses visited Spectacles, and the whole effort could crash and burn miserably.

But if Snapchat has earned anything, it’s the benefit of the doubt.

The $129 shades, which are coming “soon,” will let the 150 million (mostly young) republic who use the social network every day shoot 10-second videos to upload to Snapchat. Lights on the front of the device will swiftly to indicate it’s recording.

The new product is a big deal for Los Angeles-based Snapchat, which shortened its name to just Snap Inc. as part of the announcement. It’s also a clear sign the company has broadened its reinforce to more than just its popular 5-year-old app, which now has nearly 15 million more users per day than Twitter.

Even notion many people know Snapchat by name, fewer get it. Everything the startup does — spurning a reported $3 billion takeover moneys from Facebook in 2013, touting a confusing user interface — is confounding to many tech manufacturing observers.

And yet it’s one of the most beloved tech affairs in the world for young people. The company says it reaches 41 percent of all 18- to 34-year-olds in the Married States on any given day.

So to narrate it out of anything is silly. The hope of CEO Evan Spiegel is that Spectacles can make tech-infused glasses — the area where Google face-planted with its Glass head-mounted diagram — finally cool. The potential market for wearables in general is huge — $25 billion by 2019, according to the research firm CCS Insight. Snap has a better shot than anyone else has had to make vivid glasses a thing.

Still, Spiegel is being cautious, only making a “limited” number of units to initiate. “We’re going to take a slow approach to pitching them out,” Spiegel told The Wall Street Journal. “It’s throughout us figuring out if it fits into people’s lives and seeing how they like it.”

A Snap spokesman declined on Monday to comment further on the Spectacles.

The shades themselves are flamboyant, loud and pointy, coming in three colors: black, teal and coral. They are unmistakably LA. Aesthetically, they remind me of the designs, shapes and colors of another LA company, the skateboard trace World Industries, started in Santa Monica. With their upturned corners, the Spectacles look a bit like the World Industries devil mascot. That SoCal vibe seems deliberate. The product’s introduction video — which has been considered more than a million times since it was posted on Friday — features sorrowful young people skateboarding around the beach.

It’s the antithesis of Google Glass, the smart eyeglasses Google introduced in 2012 and then pulled off the market while they were mostly ridiculed. Glass looked sleek, futuristic and therefore not of the here-and-now — alienating in how much the method shunned the actual zeitgeist for the zeitgeist the concern thought it could foolishly manufacture. They were self-important in a way that let them cause a symbolof what everyone disliked about the tech industry.

Spectacles, by comparison, look like $8 shades you could pick up at a souvenir obnoxious on the beach or Manhattan’s St. Mark’s Place. There is a very deliberate reason Spiegel referred to them as a “toy.” They’re so unassuming land might forget to get offended.

Of course, when Google Glass came out, the spectacles also got the befriend of the doubt. But marketing woes led to a hastily downfall. At first, Google only made a $1,500 test version available to “explorers” — mostly web developers and spanking early adopters, not exactly at the precipice of customary. There were privacy issues because you couldn’t tell if Glass was recording. And there was this picture of noted tech blogger Robert Scoble, naked and wearing them in the shower. The photo made Glass uncool overnight. Even Google co-founder Larry Page told Scoble he “didn’t appreciate” the mug.

Because of Google Glass’s big failure, Snapchat’s bar for success is pretty low. The Spectacles could be a hip trend for a spiteful time, and then slip into oblivion. And that much still be okay. The fashion road to hell is paved with current shit that was cool one day, then, in the blink of an eye, not. reflect slap bracelets and Kanye West shutter shades.

Snapchat’s edge is in how it’s pitched the emanates — and therefore the rules of success. If it can dislike its shades are cool for just a little while, Snapchat gets to keep innovating and trying out new things. Unlike Glass, Spectacles aren’t being heralded as The Future of Computing. They’re just a pair of shades with a camera that cost near what you’d pay for some nice sunglasses.

Michelle Obama, the first lady of the United States, has joined Snapchat in an effort to reach a younger audience and inspire them.

The pleasant lady will use Snapchat to “give young people everywhere a fun way to behindhand her trip, learn about the more than 62 million girls near the world who aren’t in school, and take share to support them,” according to an official blog post and a White House stupid release on Tuesday

She’ll be taking a trip to Liberia, Morocco and Spain starting June 27 and returning July 1, which she’ll be documenting on her Snapchat account.

If you want to behindhand along, her Snapchat account is “MichelleObama.” You can also easily scan her profile pic using the Snapchat app, which the White House has conveniently devoted in JPEG form. See it above.

Obama joining Snapchat is just the novel item in a recent White House social media blitz.

Google unveiled its latest features for Pixel phones on Monday, including an option to quickly access Snapchat from your lock mask and to use your Pixel 6 as a digital car key. 

With the software update, Pixel owners can open the messaging app directly from the lock mask with a new feature called Quick Tap to Snap. The feature is available for all Pixels valid the 5G Pixel 4A. And Google is adding a Pixel-exclusive lens, requested Pixel Face, to your snaps starting this month. 

Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro owners are sketching an additional update. For some 2020-2022 BMW models, Pixel 6 owners can lock and unlock their car by tapping the requested to the door handle. They can also start a BMW by placing a Pixel 6 on the interior key reader at what time pressing the engine start button. The option to use the Pixel 6 as a digital car key comes once Android 12 introduced a similar feature earlier this year.  

The updates are pitching out Monday through next week.