Snaptu

» see snaptu.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

by the time snaptu was worth knowing about, i was already on the other side of the smartphone line. it was built for the people who were not, the ones whose only phone was a cheap handset with a browser and not much else behind it. i had a proper phone and ttnet at home, so snaptu solved a problem i did not have. to be honest.

still, the engineering was clever, and i can respect it from here. snaptu came out of an israeli startup founded in 2007, first under the name moblica. the whole trick was that the apps did not really run on your phone. they ran on snaptu's servers, which drew a light screen and sent it down the wire, so a facebook or twitter app could work on a handset with almost nothing under the hood.

that made it one of the few ways someone on a basic phone could touch the same networks everyone with a smartphone was already living on. for the big feature-phone markets it was a real bridge, not a toy.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

server-side rendering was the right answer to a hard question, how do you put a modern app on a phone that cannot run one. in those days. snaptu did the heavy work in the cloud and left the phone with the easy part, drawing what it was told to. that is why it ran on so many different handsets when nothing else could.

~ what it became ~

facebook noticed. the two had already built a facebook app together, out in january 2011, and by march facebook bought the company outright for somewhere around sixty to seventy million dollars. the standalone snaptu service was switched off at the end of 2011, with a message pointing people at its replacement, facebook for every phone.

~ what came after ~

here is where the little shim outlived itself. facebook kept the snaptu technology and, in 2015, used it to build facebook lite, the stripped-down android app for slow phones and slow networks. so the thing that started as a way to get facebook onto a nokia keypad ended up as how the next billion low-end android users reached facebook at all. not a bad afterlife for a four-year-old startup.

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