Snapchat launched on Android on October 29, 2012. The release expanded the service beyond its original iPhone audience and made its disappearing-photo concept available to users of Google’s mobile operating system.
Snapchat had begun as Picaboo on iOS in July 2011 and was relaunched as Snapchat later that year. For much of its earliest period, the service was closely associated with Apple devices. The Android release therefore marked an important step in broadening Snapchat’s reach, even though it followed the iOS debut by more than a year.
The timing is easy to confuse with later milestones. In November 2012, reports noted that users had already shared more than one billion photos on the iOS app, while Snapchat was also handling tens of millions of images each day. Video sharing arrived in December 2012, shortly after the Android launch, so video is not part of the original October release milestone.
Symbian and Windows Phone were not the operating systems named in this launch fact. The key distinction is simple: iOS came first; Android followed on October 29, 2012.