Snapster

» see snapster.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In the summer of 2015 VKontakte started blocking Instagram links posted inside VK. Not throttling them quietly, blocking them, on the largest social network in the Russian-speaking internet. The reason had shipped a few weeks earlier: Snapster, VK's own photo app, released on 17 July for iOS and Android and credited to Oleg Illarionov. It did filters and sharing, and it had rooms, shared albums where a group could pile photos into one place around a theme.

The block did not work. Pavel Durov, pushed out of VK by then, said publicly that he intended to keep using Instagram, and that a company spending its attention on a competitor was showing fear rather than strength. That was the founder of the network commenting on his old company's flagship product from the outside, which tells you roughly how the launch was going.

VK kept trying. Version 2.0 arrived on 22 March 2016 and reworked the whole app around photos that deleted themselves on a timer, which parked Snapster somewhere between Instagram and Snapchat without being the obvious choice over either. By autumn 2017 the team's own estimate of who was still using it was thousands. VK at that point had tens of millions of people opening it every day.

None of this reached Turkey. VK's gravity was Russian-language and it stopped hard at the language border, so Snapster's two-year fight happened in a market with no window into it from here. What Turkey had in 2015 was Instagram, working normally, with no domestic alternative anybody was being pushed toward.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the block ~

Breaking your own link handling to keep users away from a rival is a move with a short shelf life, and VK's version of it is worth writing down because it failed so publicly. Three years after Snapster died, VK opened an official Instagram account. The company that had been willing to sabotage its own product to keep people off that platform ended up doing its marketing there.

~ the switch-off ~

The announcement came on 28 September 2017. The team described Snapster as a bold experiment and said it was time to end it. Rooms were disabled, the social layer came off, and an export page let you pull down whatever you had posted before it went. The binary stayed in the app stores afterward as a photo editor with nothing behind it, which is a stranger fate than deletion.

~ what it was actually for ~

Snapster was not built because anyone in Russia was asking for another photo network. It was built because Instagram was taking a category VK considered its own, and a company with a hundred million accounts assumed it could simply redirect them.

The assumption is the part worth keeping. Distribution that large usually does move people. Here it moved almost nobody, twice, across two product designs that had nothing in common except the name on the icon.

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