Evan Spiegel

Those were all really new things at the time.

You know, one of my favorite stories was around screenshot detection, actually, in the early days, because when we first built Snapchat and we shared with people, oh, you could send photos to disappear.

Everyone said, no, you can't.

You can always take a screenshot.

What do you mean you can send things to disappear?

That makes no sense.

And so, you know, we thought a lot.

I remember that summer, you know, after school, we went home, we're working on my dad's house and Bobby and I were just going back and forth.

And we were like, you know, we were having fun using the product.

We were sending, you know, photos back and forth.

But people would just keep saying, well, this like this just it's not about disappearing photos because you can just save them.

Like, I don't get it.

And one of the things we invented at the time, we figured out a way, we realized that if you were pressing and holding to open a snap and left your finger on the screen and you took a screenshot, it would basically trigger, you know, an event on the phone essentially that made...

the phone would essentially report that your finger had lost contact with the screen, right?

That's what the screenshot mechanism did.

So even though Apple didn't provide an API at the time to let you know that a screenshot had been taken, there was a way for us to essentially detect this touch event to learn that a screenshot had happened.

And then we would just send a notification back to the sender that, oh, the recipient had taken a screenshot.

And that for us in the early days, really resonated with our community because they didn't mind if somebody saved one of their snaps, they just wanted to know.

And I think that that, you know, that early invention was one of the first things that really got a lot of traction in the early days.

And I think, you know, helped Snapchat spread as a new way of communicating.