- 5/30/2025
Kids these days, you know? They love the '90s, they want everything to be colorful and bold and bouncy, and they really, truly love Snapchat. And the tech world is listening. On this episode, The Verge's Allison Johnson joins to talk about her review of the new Razr Ultra, the new-look Android 16, and why she thinks we're getting ever closer to a true flip phone resurgence. (Also: why we're not quite there yet.) After that, The Verge's Alex Heath explains what's going on with Snapchat, and how it's possible that the app is more popular than ever but still can't figure out how to cash in. It all makes us wonder: is there a business in chat at all? Finally, we answer a question on the Vergecast Hotline (call 866-VERGE11 or email vergecast@theverge.com!) about a possible outcome for Chrome after the Google search trial ends.
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TechTranscript
00:00:00Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of really important technology with absolutely
00:00:08no business model. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am somewhere in the woods in the mountains
00:00:13of Virginia. This is the week every year that is Mother's Day, my wife's birthday, our wedding
00:00:19anniversary, and this year, her grad school graduation, congrats Anna, all in the span
00:00:24of seven days. So we try to get away, we try to have some fun, and this time it was ghosted in
00:00:29the woods, and just be quiet. It's been lovely, can't recommend it enough, but that is not what
00:00:34we're here to talk about today. Today we're going to do two things on the show. First, we're going to
00:00:38talk about a couple of really important new devices, and by new devices, I mean flip phones. The new
00:00:45Motorola Razr Ultra is out, Allison Johnson reviewed it, we're going to talk about that, and we're also
00:00:49going to talk a little bit about whether this is finally the year of flip phones. Then Alex Heath
00:00:54is going to come on, and we're going to talk about Snapchat, we're going to talk about WhatsApp, and
00:00:58we're going to talk about whether letting people talk to each other is actually a tech
00:01:02business that even exists. We also have a really fun question on the VergeCast hotline. Lots
00:01:06of stuff to do. All of that is coming up in just a sec, but first, I have, I'm going to
00:01:11be honest, just like a tiny bit more celebrating to do, and also I have not yet baked a cake,
00:01:15so I got to go bake a cake. Wish me luck. This is the VergeCast. We'll be right back.
00:01:19Welcome back. Allison Johnson is here. Hi, Allison.
00:01:26Hello.
00:01:27I've seen a lot of you recently for reasons I both can and cannot explain yet, and this
00:01:32is very exciting. It's nice to see you again.
00:01:34It's good. It's a good addition to my life. I don't know.
00:01:36So, there are two Android-y things I want to talk about. One is kind of the big picture
00:01:44Android 16 material, three cool kid, young people design. But first, I want to talk about
00:01:52the Razer.
00:01:53Yes.
00:01:53Because you and I might be the only people on earth who believe in flip phones, but I still
00:01:59believe in flip phones.
00:02:00Yes, I do too.
00:02:01You reviewed the new Razer Ultra, which is like the high-end flip phone. What was the
00:02:09verdict? How'd you feel?
00:02:10It's so beautiful. I can't emphasize this enough. I don't get to say this a lot. They're shaped
00:02:19like phones. They look like phones. We've settled on a thing for phones. This is a gorgeous
00:02:26phone. So, the Ultra comes in the fancier finishes. They're all kind of fun. There's the regular
00:02:32Razer and then the Razer Plus. This one has the wood panel back, maybe because I made such
00:02:38a stink about it. Motorola knew that that's the one I wanted. It's gorgeous. It's not a
00:02:47huge departure or huge evolution of the Razer, I would say, from last year. There's some upgraded
00:02:55specs. You get the Snapdragon 8 Elite processor, which is just the most amount of firepower you
00:03:02can throw at a phone right now. It has a slightly bigger interior screen than the other two. It has
00:03:09a 7-inch display. It's a little bit higher resolution. And you get upgraded cameras. There's
00:03:16an upgraded 50-megapixel main camera, an ultra-wide, and then a 50-megapixel selfie camera.
00:03:22The cameras, by the way, seems like a super big deal to me. Because I think
00:03:25one of the reasons I was excited about this phone in the first place is it's one of the first
00:03:31flip phones I can think of where you don't look at the spec sheet and immediately see some glaring
00:03:37deficiency. That is like, in theory, this is just a very good phone that also happens to be a flip
00:03:43phone. It's not like the Samsung stuff. It always has worse cameras than the normal candy bar phones.
00:03:49And there's always some issue. And the ultra seems like it's the first one with a feature-complete
00:03:56spec sheet, which is very exciting to me.
00:03:59It is. I would say it has closed the gap more than any other flip phone, for sure.
00:04:05But it's not all the way there?
00:04:07Yeah. Just the thing is, they called it ultra, which already, you know, you're making your bed when
00:04:15you call a phone ultra. And the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra exists. It, you know, it costs $1,300.
00:04:25And if you want to get into like, how much phone can you get for $1,300? You can get a phone with
00:04:32so many cameras, you know, and like, an amazing display. Like, if you want to get into that,
00:04:38there's still kind of, we're not quite at like, parity, I guess. But this does feel like,
00:04:44they're like, we shoved as much as we can in here. You know, I, I found the battery life was like,
00:04:51real good, honestly, which is, yeah, is a concern for a flip phone, because they are secretly just
00:04:58like two small phones, like, strapped together. Yeah, it feels more than ever before. Like,
00:05:06if you, if you have been thinking about a flip phone, and kind of put off by like, yeah, you know,
00:05:12but I want a little more, I don't want to give up so much. This, you don't have to give up quite so
00:05:17much this time around. Yeah. The other thing Motorola seems to be doing here is having just
00:05:22increasingly more ideas. Yeah, some of those ideas seem to be good. And some of them seems to be bad.
00:05:27But I feel like the two pieces of it that I most want to talk about are the outside screen,
00:05:32which I think, my impression has been Motorola has kind of done the most of the flip phone
00:05:37manufacturers in terms of like, what you can actually do on the outside screen. And then we
00:05:42have to talk about AI. But let's talk about that later, because I don't want to. The outside screen,
00:05:47what has has Motorola, like, continued to kind of dial in what you can do with the phone closed?
00:05:52Yeah, and I think for my money, they, they're ahead. And I have to apologize to the flip phones that
00:05:59are not sold in the US. I don't really get to play with those. So I'm really kind of basing this on
00:06:05experience versus the Samsung Z Flip 6. Sure. Motorola just makes it super inviting and really
00:06:11easy to enable apps on the outer display. There's little games, which I normally shrug off. I was
00:06:19like, I don't want to play a little marble game. But I handed the marble game to my child,
00:06:24to my three year old, and he friggin loves it. And he's actually kind of good at it. So like,
00:06:32that's been a weird little bonus feature where I just hand him the phone and it's closed. And he
00:06:37has a little marble game moment. But they make it really easy. There's a new like widget panel. So
00:06:43you can kind of get even more like, into customization for it. The just like the media player is cute.
00:06:52You can make it a tape deck and the little tape reels, like move as the music is playing. I just it's
00:07:00fun. Yeah, I love it. The thing I've been trying to decide with all of the outside screens on flip
00:07:05phones is whether their job is to be like a worse phone, or if their job is to be more like a smart
00:07:12watch where it's like, simple controls, but you can't actually do very much, right? Like you hit one
00:07:19button at a time. And that's kind of it. Yeah. What's your read on sort of in day to day use,
00:07:24how you want the outer screen to work? I think it's somewhere in the middle. I kind of started
00:07:28with like, the flip phone has a little smartwatch on the front. And that's cool and fun. And you can
00:07:33do quick things. I end up doing a lot more than that on this phone. I actually had my like digital
00:07:40boarding pass for my flight on there. And I pulled it out and had the gate agent scan it. And he was
00:07:48like, that's a cute little phone. I was like, Oh, he doesn't know. It's two phones in one.
00:07:55But I like, I enable a lot of apps. So I can just fully open up Strava, I can choose my activity,
00:08:05start my bike ride, and then just like put the phone away in my pocket. Have I saved some kind of
00:08:10amazing amount of time? Or is it that much more convenient? I think it's like a an emotional,
00:08:16like mental thing, where I don't feel like I had to like dive into my whole phone and look at every
00:08:21notification. So for me, it's really, it's really somewhere in the middle, I respond to text,
00:08:27I'll use the little keyboard, it's kind of janky, but it's perfect for just like, hey, on my way or
00:08:33those kind of things. So it can be it can be less if you want it to be. But for me, I've kind of
00:08:39crept towards like, it's a cute little phone when I want it.
00:08:44Can you do things like open settings and get to the notification shade? And like, if you want
00:08:50sort of the full phone experience on the front screen, can you get it?
00:08:53You can get a lot. Yeah, it has its own kind of built in UI for there's a, the notifications panel,
00:09:01and you can swipe through that like you normally would. There's quick settings and, and all that
00:09:07stuff, you can you can run any app you want. And you just have to tap through an alert that says
00:09:14like, hey, this might suck. And sometimes it really does. But yeah, it's like, Motorola is very like,
00:09:23it's your world, you can do what you want with this. And I love that.
00:09:26Yeah, that feels like mostly the right answer. There is a little part of me that is like,
00:09:29there should be a set of things that it protects you from in a certain way, where it's like,
00:09:35the notification shade is an interesting one, right? Because I feel like it should I want it
00:09:38to show me the notification that like just buzzed in my pocket. But I actually feel like I want to
00:09:44have to open the phone in order to go get the rest of my notifications. Because there's just that that
00:09:49little tiny bit of added friction feels like it's useful. And again, it's the thing you're describing
00:09:55that I think I find so charming about flip phones in the first place is that like, when I go to a text
00:10:00message, making it a literal physical activity, I have to do in order to then go open Instagram
00:10:06is going to prevent me from opening Instagram. Oh, yeah.
00:10:09And I think like that that's probably still true in this case, just because the front screen is
00:10:14small enough and not quite good enough to really be a good Instagram experience. But I do feel like
00:10:18dialing in that sort of how do we give you all the things to do?
00:10:22Without then just sort of letting you into your phone, unless you open the phone feels like
00:10:27that's the balance. I don't know that anybody has quite dialed in.
00:10:31Yeah. And it's a little bit of like, personal responsibility, because Instagram is 100% the
00:10:37one I will like, mindlessly tap on a notification from the outer screen. And it'll be like,
00:10:43you want to open Instagram? Like I haven't enabled it for the outer screen. I'm like,
00:10:48oh, no, no, no, I don't actually. And then I like back away. Like the social media apps,
00:10:53really, I've kept off the front screen. It would be a bad experience using them. You could
00:10:59if you wanted to, but I have maintained that as my barrier of like, I'm not going to cross this
00:11:06line. I'm going to have to make a conscious decision to open the phone if I want to check
00:11:10on Instagram.
00:11:12Yeah. And that's an okay balance that you can set that up for yourself feels like a good,
00:11:15that's an okay way to do it.
00:11:16Yeah.
00:11:17Tell me about the AI stuff. I think Motorola, again,
00:11:20has just a lot of ideas about what AI is supposed to do on your phone.
00:11:24Yeah, it was a little overwhelming. I, I'm still like, reserving a little bit of judgment,
00:11:29because I want to live with some of this stuff a little bit longer. But so they have introduced
00:11:34something called Moto AI, which is really just there's an app on the phone. And it's kind of a
00:11:40dashboard for all the these AI features that that live alongside Gemini in every piece of AI that
00:11:48Google had shoved into Android. But Moto AI is is like a handful of things. There's catch me up,
00:11:57which will summarize your recent notifications from messaging apps.
00:12:02Is Motorola better at this than Apple is?
00:12:04Yes. You know what?
00:12:06Really?
00:12:06Well, yes and no, because it can only do the messaging apps. So I'm like, catch me up. And
00:12:11I have a bunch of emails that I really need to get into. And it's just like, you didn't get any
00:12:16texts in the last hour.
00:12:18Is that even solving or I don't feel like my notification overload is my messaging apps.
00:12:22Yeah, I know. It's that's where I'm hung up on it. I like that. It's you opt in. You're like,
00:12:30sure, I need this at this moment. And it makes me more irritated with the Apple alternative,
00:12:35which is like, we're going to give you a weird little summary of every single notification
00:12:39might be wrong, too. You got to double check it. So there's that. There is something called
00:12:46remember this, which it's a little pixel screenshots ish, because you can screenshot of a
00:12:52website, you can take a picture of something, you can, I believe, you can just write yourself a
00:12:58little text note, and it'll save it and kind of catalog it in the way of AI reading it and tagging
00:13:05it. And then you, you ask the Moto AI later, like, hey, what time is my flight tomorrow? And
00:13:11in my experience, it was good with that stuff. It didn't go hallucinate another flight out of
00:13:19another airport. Yeah. But has that catch where you have to remember to add stuff to it.
00:13:25Right. But I will say, I think that is a very cool sort of overall idea. This idea of like,
00:13:31you just need a place to dump stuff that you encounter on your phone. Yeah. You know,
00:13:35you screenshot a text message, or you see a recipe or whatever, and you just sort of dump it all
00:13:39somewhere that you can like access and query later, I think is the right idea. I'm not super sold on the
00:13:45idea that every phone manufacturer should make this for themselves. I feel like this is better
00:13:49as like a cross platform thing tied to an account that I already have instead of all living on my
00:13:54phone. But this still feels like that in terms of like phone AI stuff actually feels sort of
00:13:59directionally correct to me in the same way that I think pixel screenshots is like a very good idea.
00:14:04Exactly. There's so many times I end up with a thing where I'm like, where do I put this? Like
00:14:09I don't want to just leave it. I don't like want to put it in a weird Chrome bookmarks folder that I've
00:14:16forgotten exists. Yeah. So that's one of the things that like, this feels promising. I want to use it a
00:14:23little more. And then there's like an AI voice, you know, recorder, then it makes a transcription.
00:14:29It's sort of like you want it to pay attention in a meeting. You do that kind of thing.
00:14:34Motorola really just trying to do pixel stuff here, it sounds like.
00:14:37A little bit. Yeah. And it gets a little AI overload with the fact that Gemini and all that
00:14:44stuff is on here. But also like they've tried to make it like very obvious how to interact with
00:14:50their AI. So there's like a little floating bubble on the screen that will get you to the AI. There's
00:14:57the Moto AI app, which is like right in the middle of the home screen. The Ultra has an AI button on the
00:15:03side. So you like long press it or short press it and get into the AI. There's also ways to like prop up
00:15:11the phone, have the front screen kind of facing you and you can like approach it and the AI will start
00:15:17listening. Weird.
00:15:19Weird. Yeah, it was all a little much. I did. I tried the propping up thing and then I just felt like the
00:15:25phone was watching me. So I guess the idea is like you have it on your desk or whatever and then you
00:15:29walk up to it like the echo show does this right where it'll it'll change the interface when you get
00:15:34close to it. Right. But instead, it's an AI assistant being like, what's up? Yeah, yeah. And there's a
00:15:39little the little glowing borders going. I'm like, what does that mean? Is it listening? Is it waiting
00:15:44for me? No, thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Didn't super love it. I do feel like Motorola is in a category I
00:15:53would put a lot of other companies in that I don't necessarily blame it for. But they're just so deep
00:15:59on the AI thing that it's like we have to overplay our hand on this that it's like, we can't be chill
00:16:05about the AI. We can't just have you discovered over time. We have to just put it in front of you
00:16:11no matter where you are all the time. And this is like early Samsung mistakes, right? Where for
00:16:16years, every time you would do anything, the little pop up would appear and Samsung would be like, did
00:16:21you know that milk music exists? And you'd be like, I don't care, Samsung. I'm good. I do know this. And
00:16:26I'm not interested in knowing this information. And my hope is give it another generation or two.
00:16:33And they will stop feeling the need to beat you over the head with AI exists in quite the same way.
00:16:39But it is, everybody is kind of overshooting their actual usefulness with a lot of this stuff.
00:16:46That said, I do think the button is a good idea.
00:16:48Yeah, the button I don't hate. I wish you could reprogram it to do something else. They don't
00:16:53let you do that.
00:16:55It should be like the iPhone's action button. Like even if you start it as an AI thing,
00:16:58but sort of let me turn it into something else. Fine.
00:17:00Yeah. We would like you to use it for AI, but you know, it's your world. Yeah. And I kind of
00:17:09sympathize with Motorola in that like, they're asking you to like, create some new behaviors with
00:17:15your phone and you have to take a minute and think like, how do we get to the AI? Or if I want to put
00:17:21this and remember this, what am I doing? So they've kind of put it everywhere. I feel like an attempt to
00:17:26be like, here you go. Um, but yeah, it, it just gets a little bit like AI overload pretty quickly.
00:17:34That's fair. So I'm going to ask you the question I ask you every year around this time. Is this the
00:17:38year of the flip phone? Man, we're going to get at least another one from Samsung. Yeah. Sounds like
00:17:45the, the flip iPhone, which is probably going to be a fold iPhone, which I would like to be on the
00:17:50record as saying is a bad decision, uh, is, is a ways out. Um, but, but like, it feels like at the
00:17:58very least we are getting to the point where you can credibly say this phone is as good as the other
00:18:04phones you might buy. And also it's a flip phone. Like we're, we're almost there and that feels
00:18:08important. Yeah. It's closer than it's ever been. I think if you've been on the fence about a flip
00:18:13phone and you're pretty sure it's a good idea for you, actually someone in the comments had a good
00:18:19suggestion that you could get one of the like low end razors on a prepaid number for like 250 bucks
00:18:29or something. Like try that out, see if you like it. And then that might be a good way to, you know,
00:18:37get your feet wet without jumping into a $1,300 phone that like the couple of things that has it,
00:18:44I hesitate about on the Motorola and all the flip phones right now. There, there's no dust
00:18:50protection. There's like part of like teeny tiny particle protect protection. It's IP 48. Um, but
00:18:58still, it's still kind of like, I would be a little more careful with this phone than a regular slab
00:19:04phone. I handed it to my three-year-old and he put his fingers all over the inner screen. Like I was,
00:19:10I didn't go easy on this thing, but, um, that's a little bit of a hesitation. I am also a little
00:19:16annoyed with Motorola's software policy. They haven't been like super great about rolling out software
00:19:23versions in a timely fashion. They support it. Um, not for not quite as many years as Samsung. I think
00:19:31they do three OS versions and then four years of security updates, which is like not as good as its
00:19:38competitors. Yeah. It's okay. Like it'll, it'll get most people as far as they want to go with this
00:19:43phone probably. But, um, yeah, just, just kind of, we're, we're getting there. I'm like, if you,
00:19:51if you are pretty sure a flip phone is for you, like it is a great year for the flip phone.
00:19:56Yeah. I was excited to, I got to try yours for a minute. Uh, and we're also still at the point
00:20:02where like, there is a crease if you look for it in the inside screen, but it's, it continues to go
00:20:10away. Like, which is, which is nice. Like even after a couple of minutes of using it, I didn't
00:20:13really notice it anymore. It's still very tall and it is still not quite as good a screen as you get
00:20:18when it's just a regular pane of glass. Uh, but like you said, we're getting there. The gap gets
00:20:23smaller and smaller every year. It seems. Yeah. I'm very excited to see what Samsung does because
00:20:28from a hardware perspective, Samsung has been out in front of this for a long time and I think
00:20:33might, might still be the one to get us there. Yeah. But we'll see that's coming later. So before
00:20:40I let you go, let's talk about the, the Android 16 stuff for just a minute. Uh, what do you make
00:20:45of this? We talked a little bit about this on Friday show, but there's a new design language for
00:20:49Android. It's very like vibrant and bouncy and colorful. Uh, there's a new font. Uh, what do you think?
00:20:55What do you make of all this? Yeah, I, I think it's fun. It's they're calling this material three
00:21:02expressive. It's a big update. That's going to be in Android 16. It's going to be in the beta later
00:21:07this month. And we got kind of a little preview of it when Google accidentally posted a blog kind
00:21:16of explaining the rationale behind the designs, you know, Google leaking Google stuff is a tale as
00:21:22old as time. That's a true tradition of this time of year. Yeah. Right. Um, but there's just a real
00:21:28emphasis in the kind of the appearance of it. It's very like, I don't know, sort of there, they talk
00:21:36about the springy animations and the, the fonts are bolder, the colors are bolder. Um, you know,
00:21:44there's new icon shapes and everything about it is just, just screams like youth, like hello,
00:21:53fellow kids kind of thing. Um, and I, that's the right call. I mean, put that next to everything
00:21:59we've seen about what's coming in iOS, which is like very pared down and simple. And they're,
00:22:05they're doing a similar kind of like layered three dimensional thing, but it's much more like
00:22:10space shippy and glassy and pristine. Uh, Android is going all the other way. And they're just like,
00:22:16get really weird with what all of this looks like. Do you think that, is that the right call for
00:22:22Android? These things were, were pushing towards each other for so long. iOS and Android were looking
00:22:26more and more like every year. And now it feels like in a pretty big way, they are absolutely
00:22:30breaking back apart. Yeah. I think it, you know, maybe it is kind of just the nature and they're
00:22:36going to split apart and come back together again at some point. But I, in my mind, I think,
00:22:42yeah, make it look different. Make it, you know, like iOS has such a stranglehold on the U S market
00:22:49or, or such a like majority. Um, and especially among young people, I think we all read a study
00:22:57last year where teenage, like 88% of teenagers have an iPhone or something like that. Um, so this feels
00:23:05like an attempt to address that market and there's a little bit of like inherent cringiness. I think
00:23:11when a big company sort of approaches a younger demographic and is like, look, we speak your
00:23:17language. Um, how do you do fellow kids is such a sick word, but also like exactly right. You are
00:23:22correct about that. But, but not, not to kind of dismiss it all as like, oh, they're just trying to
00:23:28like pander to Gen Z. I think it's, it's good to refresh things. And it seems like they've put a
00:23:35lot of thought into like, how do we make this more usable for everybody? And, and I think making
00:23:41something that looks like an, an iOS clone is, wouldn't be a smart move right now. I think
00:23:49leaning into the difference of like, yeah, this is not an iPhone. This is something else. It's,
00:23:56you can make it purple and pink if you want. And it looks cool.
00:24:01Are you a customizer? By the way, one of the things I've been thinking about a lot with this is that
00:24:05there is this big push toward letting you do whatever you want with your phone. And I keep
00:24:11trying to figure out how to put that next to the thing that we have known and said for forever,
00:24:16which is that defaults are the only thing that matter. Right. And so I'm like, is this, am I
00:24:19giving these companies too much credit for giving people more customization tools that statistically
00:24:25speaking, they're never going to use? Or is there something to the idea that actually these things
00:24:30are becoming more personal and more versatile and what we should be giving people is more knobs
00:24:35and buttons and options to mess with? Yeah. Maybe it's a good moment to try it. I think,
00:24:40because yeah, I think in the past, like I don't super customize my phone. I play around with all the
00:24:48options. I, I pick one of the color palettes and material you and, and then I, I'm like, this looks
00:24:55weird. And I just go back to the regular one, but maybe kind of as the, as the hardware has just hit
00:25:02a point where, you know, flip phones and folding phones side, they all look the same. Like a Samsung
00:25:08phone looks like an iPhone looks like a pixel is unless you're looking at the camera bump. Um, so maybe
00:25:16that's kind of right for like, we'll do something fun and different in the software. And people might,
00:25:22might actually try these things out if they're like, you know, I, I would like a different color
00:25:27palette. I see, I see more like colorful, fun iOS lock screens, you know, since Apple made that change.
00:25:35I don't believe I've seen anyone outside of the, my, my fellow, like, you know, phone sickos,
00:25:45um, tinting the icons on their home screens. Like, like normies are not doing that. I don't
00:25:51think phone sickos is, is the exact correct description of who does that. Yes. And I put
00:25:56myself in that category love lovingly with all, all of my fellow with all of these personalizations.
00:26:02My problem is like, and it's like what you said with the material you colors, like 60% of it. I'm
00:26:07like, this looks awesome. I love it. It's so cool. And then like four times a day you open a screen and
00:26:12it just like, it just feels and looks awful and everything is bad. And I'm like, I'm just going to
00:26:17go back to the way that it was. And so I think like, my hope is if these companies and Google
00:26:22in particular can stay committed to this idea that it'll actually get developers and users and
00:26:28like wallpaper makers and everybody to buy into this way of thinking about what a phone should
00:26:32look like and start to solve some of those edge cases. Cause right now it's like half the icons
00:26:38on my screen look great in whatever color I've chosen. And the other half look like butts and you
00:26:43like, you got to fix that. Right. Fix the butts, please. Fix the bus and then Android will be
00:26:49perfect is my takeaway. Exactly. Uh, so Android 16 coming this year seems like it, it might be the
00:26:56most interesting Android in a minute. Like it's been a while since we had an Android that you sort
00:27:01of update your phone and look at it and go, Oh, it's different now. This feels like it might do it.
00:27:05And I'm excited about that. Yeah, me too. And there's, there's other stuff they've got kind
00:27:09of like a live activities thing. Um, there's going to be new haptics and all that. It's
00:27:16going to look and feel and do different things. So yeah, it's been a minute. I'm excited for
00:27:21that. Me too. All right. Well, we got to take a break and then we're going to come back.
00:27:25We're going to talk about Snapchat. Alison, thank you as always. Thank you. We'll be right
00:27:28back. I made a mistake. I hung up on Alison before we did one thing that Alison asked.
00:27:33So Alison's back. Hi Alison. I'm back. You had a special request for the people. I do.
00:27:38What's up? I have the great honor of hosting a couple episodes of the Vergecast this summer
00:27:44and something I want to do is ask all of you, um, to, to let me know your phone buying
00:27:52conundrums. I want to hear from people who are considering a new phone, who are stuck between
00:28:00two phones, who don't want to upgrade their iPhone mini. I see you. I am one of you.
00:28:08Um, this can be a pep talk. This can be therapy. I can help you talk through a buying decision.
00:28:15Um, I spend all day thinking about what phone people should buy. So this is like, I'm just like
00:28:20itching to provide this service. So, so send me your, your quests, your requests, your questions,
00:28:28your, your troubles. I would like to hear them. I love this. I'm going to call and ask you if,
00:28:33uh, it's actually time for me to give up on the iPhone and switch to Android. If I should go
00:28:38through the pain of leaving iMessage once and for all, that's mine. Okay. That'll be a 60 minute,
00:28:43uh, segment. Uh, cool. And so, yeah, same way as always call the hotline 866-VERGE-11 email
00:28:50vergecastatheverge.com. Uh, yeah, you and a bunch of folks are going to have a lot of fun on this show
00:28:55over the summer. And I am very excited. It's going to rule. I'm so excited. Sweet. All right.
00:29:01Now we're going to take a break for real. Alison, thanks again. Thank you. We'll be right back.
00:29:08All right. We're back. Alex Heath is here. Hi, Alex. Hey, David. So as we do from time to time,
00:29:14you and I need to talk about Snapchat. It's possible that you and I are the only people
00:29:18in the news business who care about Snapchat, which is I think part of the point,
00:29:22but I care deeply about Snapchat and I want to talk about it. So I think we should probably start
00:29:28like last fall, uh, because Snapchat launches this big or announces that they're doing this
00:29:34big redesign, kind of a whole new way of thinking about Snapchat. I think they called it simple
00:29:39Snapchat. Uh, and you, you like understood what was going on at the time. And I think we talked
00:29:44about it a little bit, but refresh our memory a little bit. Like what was Snapchat trying to do
00:29:48with this big change last fall? Yeah. Snapchat started as a pretty simple disappearing messaging
00:29:53app. And over the years, they added on a lot of stuff. Uh, there's a map where you can see where
00:29:59your friends are in the app. There's memories, which is essentially their own camera roll experience.
00:30:05There's discover, which was their really early take on how a publishing environment can work in a
00:30:12visual messaging application. And then they were doing spotlight, which was their Tik TOK video,
00:30:20you know, full screen swipe up and down competitor. And it was just a lot.
00:30:24That is a lot of stuff. Yeah.
00:30:26They're also scaling beyond their core demographic of young people. And I think older people don't want
00:30:35a ton of tabs. And so the idea was let's condense all of this. They really need their content business,
00:30:41the video business spotlight and discover to get bigger and be more culturally relevant.
00:30:47And the idea was let's just simplify everything to three tabs, messaging, the camera snap always
00:30:52opens to the camera. And then on the right, you would have, um, all of the video content and
00:30:58publisher content merged together into just one feed like reels or Tik TOK. And this was, you know,
00:31:04meant to not only appease investors by making the video business more front and center, but
00:31:09hopefully make the app more intuitive and encourage more people to not just message their friends on
00:31:15snap, but watch video, watch stuff from creators, watch stuff from publishers.
00:31:22The theory of that still, even as you describe it strikes me as a good idea that I think like
00:31:27snaps whole thing has been trying to do all of this in one place makes sense. Right. And I think
00:31:32you can sort of litigate that forever. If the messaging app and the content business should have
00:31:36been fully separate products, but snap has believed that they should be at least next to each other
00:31:42for a very long time. And the idea of like camera in the middle, talk to your friends on one side,
00:31:49public facing video feed on the other side. Like that, that makes sense to me. That is like,
00:31:54that is the Snapchat that seems like it could work. And yet, and yet they, they, in an earnings report,
00:32:01just recently, they just bailed on that whole entire idea. What is happening here?
00:32:07I think, you know, and this is the broader discussion about snap we're going to have,
00:32:10but I think snap is really struggling to execute, uh, especially over the last, I would say five years,
00:32:18really. Um, there was a moment where it seemed like they were inventing all these new formats,
00:32:23really looking ahead to where social media was going. Everyone was copying them.
00:32:27And lately it's just been a lot of executional business strategy mishaps. And what happened with
00:32:36this simple Snapchat rollout was that it was really hurting engagement with the audience that
00:32:43consumes content the most, which was the opposite of what they wanted to happen. Uh, so they have this
00:32:48innovators dilemma thing where they have this business that they, and because snap is so already
00:32:53financially, uh, on the rocks, they can't take huge swings like they used to. Like when they
00:33:01redesigned the app right after they IPO'd and then Kylie Jenner posted about how it sucked and
00:33:05the stock tanked and all of that. Right. You can't really afford another one of those.
00:33:09Yeah. They stuck with it at the time and now they're just so beholden to wall street and quarterly
00:33:15earnings and proving that they can actually be a real business that they can't afford to tank,
00:33:20uh, their business with a redesign like this, even if they think it's the thing that's going to work
00:33:25in the long run. So yeah, it was a big swing and a miss. Yeah. And it does feel like that tension
00:33:30you described might be just unsolvable at some point for Snapchat. Cause it is the, the two things
00:33:36that keep happening are like, especially for young users, they're growing up and continuing to use
00:33:42Snapchat. And there is like a, there is a world in which Snapchat is more and more sort of culturally
00:33:48important to vast numbers of people than ever. Like it is, it is a, a communication tool that like
00:33:55several generations of people now use all day, every day. And that is very important and very
00:34:01powerful. And yet Snapchat cannot figure out how to make a single nickel off of that entire thing.
00:34:06Uh, and so it just seems like it's, it's now stuck in this business of trying to be TikTok or
00:34:14reels when TikTok and reels exist. Well, let's give them a little credit. They make more than a
00:34:20nickel. Um, how, how much revenue do you think they made last quarter? Oh, that's an interesting
00:34:26question. I want to ask you that. And then how many users do you think they have? Um, I think the
00:34:32audience will be surprised by both of these. I'm going to guess there's more users than revenue.
00:34:36Actually, no, but they're close. Okay. I think I'm give me the numbers. I'm going to bet it's
00:34:43well, quarterly annually. Yes, but quarterly. So they're, they're doing about 1.3 billion a year
00:34:48in a quarter in revenue. That's higher than I would have guessed. I was going to guess like
00:34:52high hundred millions. Yeah. And they've surpassed 900 million monthly active users. So they are
00:34:58rapidly approaching a billion users over 460 million of those are daily. That's huge. Like that,
00:35:04that, those are giant numbers. Significantly larger than X. Um, it's in the same ballpark
00:35:11as like Telegram, maybe bigger. Um, obviously Meta's platforms are, are larger. Um, but in
00:35:17terms of like independent social media, it's by far the biggest. Yeah. And at the same time,
00:35:24uh, Snap's stock price, if you pull it up from when they went public, God, what is it like
00:35:3110 ish years ago now is, is negative. Uh, so this is a business that has gone sideways over
00:35:37the last decade while at the same time scaling its user base by a dramatic, uh, you know,
00:35:43percentage. And I think that just goes to show that maybe the thesis of this conversation too,
00:35:49that maybe you can't make money off of messaging. I don't know.
00:35:52Well, yeah, I mean, I guess is it, would you chalk that up to, like you said, sort of pure
00:35:59executional failure? Like, is this just a function of not having a very good sales team or like,
00:36:04or is there something kind of fundamentally different about what Snapchat is and who it's
00:36:10reaching that just doesn't work the same way that it has for other companies?
00:36:15I think it's a mix of all of that. I think it's really hard to compete with a platform like Meta
00:36:21that has over 10 million advertisers platforms with billions of users. And it's just been grinding
00:36:26on the ad stuff and now AI, uh, which is increasingly getting intertwined with ads for
00:36:33much longer at a much larger run rate. And, you know, I think snap also has been kind of precious
00:36:40about things for far too long. It is now finally realizing it needs to be a real business. And I
00:36:46think that delay in getting there really costs them. Um, and you know, snap, I I've been covering
00:36:53snaps since, you know, before they went public, um, when they were very small startup, the headlines
00:36:59like is Snapchat dead is Snapchat cooks, you know, Snapchat's almost dead have been written many times.
00:37:05I've written them many times. The company has still held on, but it's definitely not what everyone
00:37:13hoped it would be. And, you know, they've tried ways to monetize, uh, they've got Snapchat plus now,
00:37:21which is a subscription that has 15 million subscribers where you get a bunch of extra
00:37:25things in the app. Um, their ads business is meaningful. It's nowhere near Meta or Google's,
00:37:31but it's, it's meaningful. It's nothing to completely, uh, thumb up, but, um, they're just
00:37:37still really struggling to figure out how to monetize the app effectively. And for the longest
00:37:43time, they just weren't monetizing the main way people use the app, which is messaging.
00:37:47And recently they started putting ads in chat and they're testing that, but they don't want to tank
00:37:52the metrics of messaging either because that's their core business. So there's just a lot of,
00:37:58they're, they're trying to do a lot, uh, because messaging and all of that, that it entails and
00:38:05really talking to friends is just really hard to put ads in. Yeah. Well, and then next to all of
00:38:11that is, is this thing that snap has been trying to sell itself as for years now, which is that
00:38:16snap is a camera company, right? That, that actually we're not about messaging. We're not
00:38:21about spotlight. We're not about any of this other stuff. We're about camera. And I think I bought
00:38:25that for a long time. And I think still to this day, like, if you want to talk about who is doing
00:38:29the most interesting AR camera stuff, I think it's probably still snap. The problem is just no one
00:38:36cares. And I think, I think either we're still too early and this is happening more slowly than we
00:38:41realized. Uh, and I mean the, the first generation of spectacles was 10 years ago and like snap has
00:38:48just been at this a long time and the, the world has not caught up to snap and either it's going to
00:38:54happen slower than anybody bet on, or it's just not going to happen at all. And I, I used to think
00:39:00with confidence that it was just, that it was happening slower. And I'm starting to wonder more and
00:39:05more if it's just not going to happen at all. You know, they don't call themselves a camera
00:39:08company anymore. Did that change? They dropped it. Yeah. They dropped it around the time they were
00:39:13redesigning the app and trying to really become an ads business. Now they're just a regular old tech
00:39:18company. They're just Snapchat again. Yeah. That feels great. I mean, they, they, they still open to the
00:39:22camera and spectacles is still very much to the sugar end of their investors. A serious bet that
00:39:28Evan Spiegel, the CEO is very focused on. Um, but yeah, they're, they're playing in a land of
00:39:35giants there. Right. Um, and gosh, you think back to like the yellow vending machines, the first
00:39:42spectacles drop, how buzzy that was. Um, and it kind of is snap in a nutshell. They created a lot
00:39:49of buzz. They did something pretty early that was foreshadowing what was to come right now with the
00:39:56meta Ray-Bans camera glasses finally taking off 10 years later. Um, but at the same time, they wildly
00:40:04overshot the demand and ended up costing them like 40 million in unsold inventory because they bought
00:40:10way more spectacles thinking this thing was going to scale way faster and then it didn't. And then
00:40:15they've like reset that division like 14 times since then. Um, so it's just this repeat
00:40:21pattern of good ideas that are probably too early. Um, and then messing up on the execution. I don't know
00:40:30how else to say it. Um, and when you look at how messaging apps are monetized, meta is probably
00:40:38the best example. They actually monetize it through ads on their other apps. So meta has this
00:40:44conglomerate where ads that point people to message with businesses and WhatsApp and messenger is a 10
00:40:51billion a year business. And those ads don't show up in WhatsApp or messenger. They show up on Facebook
00:40:58and Instagram and they point people to those apps. So meta has built this flywheel with these products
00:41:03that serve different purposes that point to each other. And that's how they're monetizing messaging.
00:41:09And then the only other really meaningful way that someone has monetized messaging besides that would
00:41:16be like a discord or a telegram, which is pretty, they're smaller and still pretty subscription based.
00:41:23Most of the revenue telegram made last year was actually from crypto from its crypto holdings.
00:41:28It has this weird cryptocurrency that you can use in the app. It sounds right. So no one has figured
00:41:33out ads in a messaging environment. And for years, um, up until the last couple of years, when they
00:41:39started testing ads in chat on Snapchat, all the people at snap, I would talk to would be like,
00:41:44we are never going to really crack revenue growth until we figure out how to monetize that messaging tab.
00:41:50Um, and they're trying now, but you know, we'll see, I think rolling back the, the discover the
00:41:55content piece back to where it was is a sign that that video business and the ads that could go in
00:42:01there, which are make a lot of money for Instagram and Tik TOK are also, uh, going to be a slower
00:42:07role for snap. So it's just a challenging time for them. Yeah. Well, and I think you bring up a broader
00:42:14point about sort of consumer messaging apps that I've been thinking about a lot because it keeps
00:42:18coming up in this meta trial too, where on the one hand, you know, there's all these conversations
00:42:23about Instagram and whether meta helped or hindered Instagram. And then on the WhatsApp side, it's just
00:42:28like, it was just this tiny lifestyle business that had no interest in making money and no plans to make
00:42:33money and was never going to make any money. And then meta bought it and like supercharged it as a
00:42:38business, but, but like not really. And for a long time, meta didn't make any money and they spent a ton of
00:42:42money on WhatsApp. And now they're just starting to, like you said, sort of turn the screws on how to make
00:42:48money off of this giant platform that you have. And it's just made me wonder, like, we are at a moment right
00:42:53now where I think you could argue that messaging like person to person messaging, group chats and texts and
00:43:01texts and whatever is like the single most important thing we do in our online lives right now. It is, it is
00:43:09how we communicate in, in so many ways. And it just isn't a business for anybody. Like I, as far as I can
00:43:16tell, no one has figured out how to directly monetize, letting you and I talk to each other on the
00:43:21internet. No one, you either have to subsidize it by making me buy an iPhone and making it really hard for
00:43:27me to leave. You have to find some, like you said, sort of ancillary way to like you, you sell ads
00:43:34where you put your number that I can text you, which is not the same. But so I'm like, I've reached
00:43:39a point now where it's like, is this, is there just not a business in chat? And if that's true,
00:43:46is that a problem? And it feels like downstream from this, that feels like it might be because then
00:43:51you look at somebody like snap who is like, Oh, what we have to do is we have to actually just ruin the
00:43:55experience for you in order to make any money off of this. I think it's a problem for people who
00:44:00can't build something around it like snap right now. Um, you're right. Like Apple doesn't make
00:44:05money off iMessage, but iMessage helps them sell iPhones. Um, and Google with its many, many messaging
00:44:12apps, I'm sure makes money indirectly from those messaging apps. I don't know. Maybe, who knows?
00:44:18They probably don't even know. Um, but yeah, it's, I mean, do you remember when snap was doing
00:44:23mini games and a little mini app store and they were trying to do WeChat and, uh, have all these
00:44:29apps and they bought like gaming studios and you could, yeah, you could, and you could transact
00:44:36to these, and all that was going to be stuff you could like invoke inside the chat, right?
00:44:39Yeah. And they shut that down too. Uh, and so they've tried, I mean, they've tried a lot of
00:44:45things. I think for them, they have to get the content piece down. They have, I mean, they have
00:44:49creators that are huge on snap, you know, David Dobrik, people like that, that have millions of
00:44:53followers make a lot of money, but it's just not culturally relevant like Tik TOK or even reels.
00:45:00And that's a problem for them. Um, maybe they don't see it that way, but I think it is. And
00:45:05they also have this relationship with publishers where they share ad revenue with a bunch of
00:45:11publishers. Vox media was in this at one point. I'm not sure if we still are. Um, and that also just
00:45:18feels like that entire chess board of publishers relationships with platforms is fraught. So
00:45:26I think the real Hail Mary, um, bet is that spectacles will work eventually. Snap will be able to
00:45:36transition to what Spiegel and to his credit, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai all also agree
00:45:43as maybe the next platform, AR glasses. It is the bet for sure. Yeah. And the,
00:45:48that will be the thing that gives them their next 10 to 20 years. Now I've written about this. I'm
00:45:54very skeptical of their ability to compete. I would love to see a smaller player, especially
00:45:58when like snap, that's been pretty innovative with the products. It does, uh, stay in the space
00:46:03and challenge the giants. But, um, with their financial profile right now, it's just, it's such
00:46:10a capital intensive business to do hardware well at scale. Um, it's just, it's very hard. It's a
00:46:17very hard uphill thing. I'm like their last spectacles that, uh, I tried last year, you
00:46:21know, they're not even for sale. They're just letting developers try them. And, you know,
00:46:25I think they'll do a consumer version and maybe the next year or two, but you know, it's going to
00:46:31cost a lot. They're not going to be able to make a ton of them. It'll still be an early adopter
00:46:35thing. Meanwhile, their investors don't really have patience for them to not be growing their ads
00:46:40business, um, the way they are. So, uh, they're still not profitable either. You know, snaps
00:46:45not made a annual profit ever. So that's, if they could really like change the way the company runs
00:46:53and be leaner and make money, um, and be content with being a smaller business, even though they
00:46:58have a huge user base, it's highly engaged, you know, maybe they'll be able to hang in there.
00:47:04Um, they also, I mean, they have the benefit, I guess you could call it a benefit or a curse of
00:47:07their founder controlled, you know, like meta, like Evan Spiegel can't be fired. Um, he controls
00:47:13the company with Bobby Murphy, the co-founder, and that's why stuff like spectacles exists. Um,
00:47:18and so yeah, that's, it's, it's a complicated, fascinating company. You know, when I'm out and
00:47:25about, I still see snap open on phones, you know, like on an airplane, I'll still see people using it.
00:47:32It's still very much like in the culture, uh, especially like among college students. Um,
00:47:37a thing I've heard is that as the pressure on how kids and teens use these platforms and the,
00:47:46a specific, you know, attacks on snap, the anonymity of it, the ephemerality, which leads to things like
00:47:54drug dealing and like sextortion. And like, there's just inherent things in the product that can be,
00:47:58um, really bad, especially for young people, uh, with the way it's designed, um, that,
00:48:03that they're starting to feel that a little bit in terms of not only just the regulatory scrutiny,
00:48:09but like the way that people and parents especially think about the product. And I think that could be
00:48:14a huge potential problem for their continued growth, especially with young people. They've
00:48:20got a lot to navigate, uh, and they've got meta and all these other companies also betting and
00:48:25spending way more money on this new hardware platform that they're trying to invent.
00:48:30Yeah. I mean, it seems like even on the messaging side, I mean, I give snap a lot of credit. I think
00:48:35it has been the most innovative messaging app for a very long time. And in terms of like how people
00:48:42talk to each other, it has always been the most interesting one, right? Everything else is, is
00:48:46either stealing features from Snapchat or just less interesting, right? Like we have a million text
00:48:52messaging platforms and nothing else that is even trying to do the thing that Snapchat does really
00:48:56well. Um, but I think you're right. It is, it is such a double-edged sword. This idea that
00:49:01everything goes away is both very sort of compelling in a, in a way right now in that,
00:49:05like what we're learning is that more things should go away on the internet, but also it comes with huge
00:49:09downsides. And I think we are reckoning with that in new ways. What is your sense of how big and maybe
00:49:17how desperate a swing ads in chat is?
00:49:21I think it's big there. They haven't fully rolled it out, um, to my knowledge, but they are starting
00:49:28to put ads in chat. Um, they just have to, it's just where it's where people spend the most time
00:49:33in the app. It always has been. And like I said, it is always driven certain people in the company
00:49:38crazy that they're not able to monetize that engagement. Um, and that's why they did stuff like
00:49:43discover and spotlight and all these other things. And AR is like, maybe we can find a way to monetize
00:49:48through that. So they have to do it. I think, um, they, they, they don't want to tank engagement
00:49:55though at the same time, like they found that they did with the redesign last year that they're
00:49:59rolling back.
00:50:00It is an interesting test. I mean, you think about, uh, we talk a lot about how sticky messaging is
00:50:05and it's one of those things. Like if you can build this sort of network of people talking to each
00:50:08other, people will stay on like almost anything else. But I also feel like the minute you put a
00:50:13pre-roll ad on me opening my group chat, I'm out, right? Like that's, that's, there are very few
00:50:19things that are going to unstick you like that. And so I think I'm again, Snapchat is a, an app that
00:50:25has really interesting and in many ways ahead of its time design ideas. And so I think this question
00:50:31of like, what, what are ads supposed to look like in chat? I just don't know. Cause I'm like a banner ad
00:50:37in between every four messages. Again, I'm out. Like, I just, I don't know. I don't,
00:50:43even know how to imagine what a successful version of this looks like, but I also understand
00:50:48why at some point snap and everybody else is going to have to figure out what it looks like.
00:50:53Yeah. I think they have to, man, I just, you know, this conversation has me reminiscing about,
00:51:00you know, 10 years ago, like using snap with, uh, my wife, who's my girlfriend at the time and like
00:51:05how we would just like share things throughout the day with each other in a way that was very like
00:51:08fluid and like goofy and like just a simple photo of something or like, yeah, like you,
00:51:13you felt more connected to people through that visual messaging thing. And there's no product
00:51:17that really has captured that since then. No, nothing. And network effects are real. And when
00:51:23you, you know, this happens, I bet a lot of people listening, listening to this can relate. You get
00:51:27older, you leave college, you, and people are using iMessage instead, or they're using WhatsApp or like
00:51:32signal or, and your networks, your, your networks fracture. And snap is just not a place where I
00:51:41have my friends anymore. And I kind of miss that. Like I miss, I miss those early days of it where
00:51:46you felt like you could be yourself and you could share just more frequently because it felt casual
00:51:52and depressurized in a way that Instagram definitely does not. Um, or, you know, some of these other
00:52:00services and yeah, them putting ads in that experience feels just like it inherently screws
00:52:06it up. So it's going to be a, a tricky balance for them. It's, it's a tough one in the way that
00:52:12like, I think one of the reasons you do something like discover is that actually it's really obvious
00:52:17how to do the ads there. It's like, that's a thing we know how to do it. It works and people
00:52:21are used to it. And it's, uh, you can understand why all of that works and even ads in stories
00:52:26and stuff like that. Like that stuff feels natural in a way that,
00:52:30there just is no version of that in, in human to human chat that I think is ever going to feel
00:52:35good to people. To your point about the, the growing the user base outside of kind of the
00:52:41core Snapchat people, what's your sense of how much they even care about that anymore? I mean,
00:52:46like you said, the user base is enormous. Uh, I, I'm, I don't know a single person my age who uses
00:52:52Snapchat, but maybe it doesn't matter. Like maybe I'm old. Uh, no, it matters. It matters. If you're
00:52:57running an ads business, it matters because teenagers can't buy a lot of stuff. So there,
00:53:02which has always been a Snapchat problem. Yeah. You really need people in their thirties and forties,
00:53:07fifties, even where a lot of the growth is happening is outside of the U S and even Europe.
00:53:13Uh, their users actually slightly declined in North America last quarter, which is a bad sign.
00:53:19You really have to be strong and growing in North America as one of these social networks that's ad
00:53:24supported for investors to believe in you, for your stock price to continue to grow, which the
00:53:30reason I focus on that is like the stock price is a trickle down of a lot of things that lets you
00:53:33hire better people. It gives you stability to make, uh, more strategic long-term decisions that cost you
00:53:40in the short term, what we just talked about with the redesign. So it matters. And I think they're
00:53:46struggling to break out of that college team market and they always have, but yeah, I mean,
00:53:55maybe the ship has sailed, you know, I've been, when you cover social media long enough, you just
00:53:59realize like network effects are all that matters. Once something tips in one direction, it's really
00:54:04hard, if not impossible to tip it the other way. And once all of your friends have decided that they
00:54:10use other apps to talk to you, how do you get them back on snap? If I had to guess, there's
00:54:16millions and millions of people just in the U S that they would love to, you know, quote unquote,
00:54:22resurrect, like bring back to the app. Um, and how do you do that? Like what is the, it used to be
00:54:28like viral, um, you know, AR filters, you know, that would turn you into a baby or something like
00:54:34that. Right. And now it's like, that's chat GPT. It's like people doing that with AI and it's like
00:54:38snap did that eight years ago. Uh, and it, and it gave them these super viral moments where people
00:54:43came to the app and they just haven't had moments like that anymore. And so the thing that I watch
00:54:49with snap is like, is the product innovation still there? Are they still shipping things regularly
00:54:56that kind of wow the industry? And that pace is definitely slowed as they're trying to fix the
00:55:00business. And so, you know, the thing that may hurt them is like focusing too much on the business.
00:55:07They have to save in spite of the product that they have to keep relevant. Um, yeah. I mean,
00:55:12it's kind of a vicious cycle at some point, right? You can't take the big swings without
00:55:16the money to take the big swings, but without big swings, you don't get the money to take the
00:55:20big swings. Yeah. We should give them credit for this scale they've hit. It's, it's still
00:55:24is next to impossible. You know, I remember I was in DC when Zuckerberg was on the stand for
00:55:29the meta FTC trial and he was talking about how to his knowledge, no independent company has
00:55:34hit a billion users. They all either get bought by a bigger conglomerate, um, or, you know, taken
00:55:41out and snap is about to hit a billion users. And that's a very hard thing to do.
00:55:46I mean, that that's why I'm so interested in this company, right? Like I cannot stop rooting
00:55:51for Snapchat, like sort of against all reality and evidence. I think Snapchat is doing a lot
00:55:59of smart, good, correct things. And it's just like the, the fact that it just, if it could
00:56:05solve the ad business, it, that would open up everything else it wants to do is such a
00:56:12frustrating reality to me that it is like what, what this company is not short of is good product
00:56:17that people like, right? Like it is, it is actually over and over able to make good products
00:56:21that people like, it just can't make enough money for any of that to matter. I mean, and I
00:56:25even think about like the pixie drone was cool and interesting and exciting. And there just
00:56:31wasn't, that's not the kind of thing you can do when you don't have an ad business, right?
00:56:35It's the kind of thing you can do when you're Mark Zuckerberg and you have just a money fountain
00:56:38coming out of Facebook all the time. Snap just can't, literally can't afford to do that.
00:56:43And it's so frustrating because there is such good product in that company and there always
00:56:47has been. And it is just like the reality of being a company in the world has prevented
00:56:53Snapchat from I think being what it actually could have been.
00:56:56Man, RIP Pixie, that one lasted less than a year. I think one of the cooler videos you've
00:57:01made, I think going through like a warehouse, like an arcade looking thing.
00:57:04That was a fun one. Yeah. I mean, yeah, there's so many things in the last few years that Snap
00:57:09has announced and then killed within a year. They were going to do this huge shopping play
00:57:13where they were going to literally put like big vending machines with AR displays on them
00:57:17in stores. I remember doing this at their event a couple of years ago and it was going to like
00:57:23let their ads be more targeted. They were going to hook into all these retailers and do AR try on
00:57:27stuff and like reduce the amount of trade-ins that stores need to do with physical goods. Like
00:57:33you could just wear the stuff on you. A really cool, innovative, kind of weird, wacky idea killed
00:57:38it within a year because they had to focus on getting the business turned around. And that back and
00:57:45forth that we've been talking about where they try a thing and then they realize they can't do it
00:57:49either because it doesn't work or it's hurting the business. They got to focus on the business
00:57:52has just been a pattern for the last like five years. And for them to really come through this,
00:58:00they've got to get out of that cycle. And I'm not sure how they do.
00:58:03Should Evan have just taken the 6 billion from Mark Zuckerberg all those years ago?
00:58:07I don't know. I mean, if it was mostly Facebook stock, which I think a good healthy chunk of it was,
00:58:15yeah, everyone at Snap would be a lot richer right now.
00:58:17Yeah, that's true. Yeah. I mean, 10 years ago, everyone should have taken the deal.
00:58:22Snap has had so many offers, you know, Google many times, Facebook again before they went public,
00:58:29you know, other companies in other parts of the world. It's a very valuable asset. Like I said,
00:58:34there's very few scaled social networks to get to a billion users that have this kind of engagement.
00:58:39It's just, can this team that's running it, make it a huge business? And so far, the answer is no.
00:58:49Right. And it does make you wonder, I mean, again, back to the like, can you make a messaging
00:58:54business a business? You wonder at some point if this is just a like structural mismatch. If like
00:59:01the thing that is great about Snapchat is never going to be its business. And that is a really
00:59:07hard problem to solve because it then means you have to go do another thing really well.
00:59:12And very few companies have actually successfully done that.
00:59:15Yeah. We'll see. I mean, spectacles is the bet. That's like the big bet outside of Snapchat.
00:59:21It's going to take a long time. And I feel like I was saying that 10 years ago. So
00:59:25this has been like the story of air glasses is like, it's going to be big in three more years.
00:59:31Yep. Yep. We were talking about robo taxis and AR glasses right about the same time. And now here we
00:59:36are.
00:59:36But look like robo taxis is a good example. And I think you and I have used this analogy before,
00:59:40like all of a sudden we're taking Waymo's and like not even thinking about it, right? Like
00:59:45sometimes this stuff does actually just arrive. I do think AR glasses will arrive. They keep getting
00:59:51pushed out farther than all these companies want. But if that timeline shrinks, maybe with the help
00:59:57of AI, maybe that helps Snap get through this. We'll see. So far, Evan has shown that he is not
01:00:04willing to give up on that.
01:00:05Yeah. I hope they don't. I still have the first spectacles here somewhere and they remain the
01:00:10coolest AR glasses I've ever used.
01:00:12Imagine though, if like they had done the Ray-Ban partnership, right? Or they had like
01:00:17done just some cool wacky, you know, they had probably worked with some high-end designer,
01:00:21but like just focused on making practical glasses with AI and cameras and like stuck with that idea
01:00:28for like 10 years. Like now it may be working, but they didn't do that. Now they're focused fully
01:00:34on displays while Meta is going to their idea from 10 years ago and scaling it.
01:00:37I know it's yeah. All of these things, like they're all running at each other again. It's
01:00:43very funny. It's like the, the thing that happened with stories is just going to happen
01:00:47again with much higher capital costs. Yeah.
01:00:50They are glasses and we're going to see how it goes. All right. We got to take a break,
01:00:53Alex. Thank you as always. Thanks.
01:00:56All right. We got to take one more break and then we're going to come back and do a question
01:00:59from the VergeCast hotline. Be right back. All right, we're back. Let's do a question
01:01:08from the VergeCast hotline. As always, you can call 866-VERGE-11. You can email vergecast
01:01:13at theverge.com. Send us all of your thoughts and feelings and questions about everything.
01:01:18Recently, it seems a lot of you have questions about places you've found ants, which I find
01:01:22extremely delightful, but also you continue to have questions about the Google trial and
01:01:27Chrome in particular. For now, let me just play you one of the questions I've actually
01:01:31gotten a few versions of over the last couple of weeks and see if I can answer it. Here it
01:01:35is.
01:01:36Hey, David. My name is Chirag and I had a thought about the court ruling and the ongoing remedies
01:01:44trial for Google and Google Chrome and the talk about spreading it off into or like having
01:01:49it sold to a separate company. But I haven't seen in any of the discussions so far folks
01:01:55considering that why won't Google just turn down the project altogether? Why do they have
01:02:01to consider selling it? Like sure, they could make some billions of dollars by selling it,
01:02:08but they probably stand to lose more, especially if they're selling it to OpenAI. The value gain
01:02:14that OpenAI can have over the long term and like the immediate market share that they would
01:02:18have, the whatever browser market share that Chrome has. It seems like unless this number
01:02:24is extremely high, which I'm sure the DOJ will not let it be, then why Google should even
01:02:32consider selling it and instead just be like, well, Chromium can go open source. We will not
01:02:37contribute to it anymore. And Chrome as a project, we just turn it down and we'll consider some
01:02:43open source project as like the default browser in Android going forward. Yeah. I'm just curious
01:02:48about your thoughts and why do you think that this is a bad idea or a good idea? And if Google
01:02:54should or Google would actually consider doing this? Thank you.
01:02:57Okay. So I think the thing about this question is it speaks to all of what's happening in this trial
01:03:05in a way that I actually find really fascinating. I asked a bunch of people this question, like,
01:03:08isn't the better idea if you want to take away Google's dominance to just shut Chrome down
01:03:12altogether, right? Just remove the project, open source it, something, right? Like just take it
01:03:18away from Google. It doesn't matter who gets it. You don't even necessarily want to sort of king
01:03:23make some other company. Just make Google get rid of something, push the project away, make it
01:03:28nobody's. I think what I've come to realize is that's actually not the goal from the DOJ in this case.
01:03:35So if you look at it, there are sort of two things going on, right? What they want to do is they want
01:03:40to undo some of Google's dominance. You have this company that has built this whole system by which
01:03:46it remains the biggest and most important thing in search, has all the market share,
01:03:50and you want to sort of systematically stop that from happening, right? But the way that the DOJ frames
01:03:57it, it's not just enough to sort of level the playing field starting now. If you say, okay,
01:04:03beginning today, May of 2025, or whenever this trial actually ends, we are all playing by the same
01:04:12rules. Google has this gigantic, essentially insurmountable lead. And even if you take away
01:04:17Chrome, all you're doing is taking Google's lead and moving it around, right? Like what the DOJ wants
01:04:25is to engineer a fairer fight. And that means not just slowing Google down, but actually speeding
01:04:32others up. And this is one of the things about this trial that I have found really complicated.
01:04:36So if you take something like Chrome and you say, okay, what we need is we want to give this to
01:04:41somebody in order to make them a viable competitor. This is what Google is facing with a lot of its
01:04:47search stuff, by the way. The DOJ's big plan to essentially white label Google search and force
01:04:52Google to give away all of the data and all of the search results and all of the query information
01:04:58that it gets from its search engine in order to let others make better search engines.
01:05:02It's the same idea here, right? It's not just you can't do X, Y, and Z anymore. It's you at Google
01:05:08have to do the work to bring a competitor or several competitors or hundreds of competitors
01:05:13up to your level. That's what the DOJ wants. And when it comes to Chrome, you have this thing
01:05:18that could just be put into an open source world and everybody could maintain it.
01:05:25But I have to say, Google's argument has been that actually building a browser is hugely
01:05:30expensive and hugely complicated. And Chrome is only as good as it is because Google has
01:05:34been the only company willing to invest this much time and this many resources into it.
01:05:40I find that very compelling. And I think the judge does too. And so the idea that you would
01:05:45just release it to everybody and Chrome would continue to be great, I think is just wrong.
01:05:49And so you end up in a position where you're saying, okay, we're either going to kill Chrome
01:05:55entirely for everybody, which I don't think is actually plausible or even maybe possible,
01:06:00given what Chrome is and where it is, you'd essentially just like blow up half of people's
01:06:06devices. Nobody, I think, wants that. So then you have to say, we have to put this in someone's
01:06:12hands who also has the resources and incentives and finances to take care of this.
01:06:16There aren't that many companies that can do that. There are a bunch of companies out there
01:06:21that would very much like to buy Chrome. Perplexity has said it wants it. Yahoo said it wants it.
01:06:27Open AI said it wants it. I mean, anybody with the resources would happily buy Chrome. It's one of
01:06:31the most popular and important things on the internet. I've heard from a lot of companies who
01:06:35are like, you don't understand having this kind of browser data is hugely important to almost any
01:06:41business on the internet. If I know what 4 billion people are doing online,
01:06:45I can figure out how to make money off of that. It's just that it's going to be really expensive
01:06:49to buy Chrome. So there aren't that many companies that can actually afford the thing. And doing that
01:06:54is going to be challenging. The flip side, though, is that whoever does get it immediately becomes
01:07:00enormously powerful, right? It's like if you just let someone buy Instagram, hugely powerful,
01:07:05because now you own Instagram. It's not like you're bringing somebody up. You've given somebody the
01:07:11most powerful version of this product on the market. And so far, it seems like the company that
01:07:18makes the most sense would be open AI. It has the resources, it has the ability to raise infinite
01:07:23money in order to be able to do stuff like this. It has a real incentive to have a browser to have all
01:07:29this data to be able to put chat to PT more directly in front of you all the time. It is the one closest to
01:07:35the same set of incentives and resources that Google has. But then, if you give open AI Chrome,
01:07:41or even let open AI buy Chrome, I think all the money is sort of immaterial, it's just money.
01:07:47Now open AI is vastly powerful and is in a position of huge authority over a lot of what we do online
01:07:53too. And the question I think in front of the judge in this case is, is it better to have two
01:08:01sort of giant superpowers of the web than one? And the problem is that we've had one and it's been
01:08:08Google. But does two solve the problem? Is Google and AI enough competition that it's okay that we
01:08:16have two companies that are, you know, a thousand miles ahead of everybody else in the race? Or is the
01:08:20goal to have dozens, hundreds, thousands of other companies that can do the kind of stuff that these
01:08:26companies are doing too. And if that's the goal, I don't think you can allow Google to sell Chrome
01:08:33to open AI. I don't even know who you have to allow Google to sell Chrome to if what you're trying to do is
01:08:39raise a whole industry. Chromium, the open source browser stack underneath a lot of this is very
01:08:45important and is one of the things that lets a lot of people roll other browsers. But Chrome won, like in every
01:08:51meaningful way, Chrome won the browser wars. And everybody else is just kind of nibbling around the
01:08:56edges. So the question in front of the court in this particular case is, do we want to king make one other
01:09:02company in order to make them as powerful as Google or at least close to it in the way that the internet
01:09:08works? And is that competition? Like, does that count? Did we do the job? Or is there some other remedy that
01:09:15we're going to have to figure out here? And I think that's why the DOJ is pursuing this idea of both kind of
01:09:22making Google white label all of its search stuff, such that any other search engine can get it,
01:09:27but also take away Chrome and give it to somebody else. And so I think where we might land is instead
01:09:31of one giant, we have two, whether it's open AI or somebody else. And then the hope is if you can also
01:09:37have dozens or hundreds or whatever of other Google quality search engines, that that market becomes the
01:09:46unsolvable thing. I don't know if that's the right answer. But I do think that's why Google isn't going
01:09:53to be allowed to just get rid of Chrome. There are a bunch of business reasons Google wouldn't do it,
01:09:58right? Like, it makes a certain kind of like logical sense to say, Google would rather just shut the whole
01:10:04thing down. But if you offer the company the chance to have, you know, tens of billions of dollars or
01:10:10nothing, they're pretty much always going to choose the tens of billions of dollars. And Google wants
01:10:16Chrome, Google wants this thing to continue to work. So it is going to hold on to it for dear life. And
01:10:21I think the idea that it would just sort of voluntarily shut it down. It makes a certain
01:10:26kind of abstract sense, but I don't think it's realistic for Google. And it's also not what the DOJ
01:10:31wants, because if it goes away, all it does is make Google the same kind of powerful, but in sort of a
01:10:36different direction. I hope that makes sense. I think it's a really interesting question. And
01:10:40there's a lot of this left to litigate. There's a lot of decisions for Judge Mehta left to make
01:10:45about what competition looks like and what it means to bring Google down versus bring others up and
01:10:50what sort of middle point there counts as success. There's a bunch left of this trial. We have closing
01:10:57arguments. We have the decision. We're months away. There's going to be appeals. It's going to be a
01:11:03while before we start this out. But I think we're starting to see what it might look like.
01:11:07And I find it totally fascinating. All right, that is it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to
01:11:11everybody who came on the show. And thank you, as always, for listening. Like I mentioned, if you
01:11:15have thoughts or feelings or questions or anything else you want to know, you can always email
01:11:19Vergecast at theverge.com. Call the hotline 866-VERGE11. We're going to have a bunch of guest
01:11:24hosts here all summer doing really fun hotline stuff in addition to everything else. So get all your
01:11:29questions in now because they are already off and running doing really fun stuff. This show is produced by
01:11:35Eric Gomez, Will Poore, and Brandon Kiefer. The Vergecast is a Verge production, part of the Vox
01:11:39Media Podcast Network. Neil and I will be back on Friday to talk about all of the stuff going on at
01:11:44Microsoft Build, all of the stuff going on at Google I.O., all the stuff going on in AI,
01:11:48and everything else. See you then. Rock and roll.
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