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Snapchat adds new link sharing & ‘Ghost Mode’ features as report claims ‘hundreds of thousands’ of unsold Spectacles

Snapchat today has released a notable update to its iOS app, while a new report offers a look at the company’s reportedly ill-fated hardware efforts. First off, TechCrunch notes Snapchat’s latest iOS update with support for more linking features and some changes to Snap Map location sharing…

With today’s update, you can now share links from other apps via Snapchat’s messaging feature. Snapchat now appears in the iOS share sheet, so when you go to send a link you can do it from anywhere in iOS.

Furthermore, you can now enable “Ghost Mode” for the Snap Map location feature for either 3 hour or 24 hour windows of time. There’s also an option to leave Ghost Mode enabled “until turned off.” Snapchat originally introduced Snap Map over the summer and quickly came under fire from privacy advocates. Nevertheless, the feature has become popular among the app’s teen user base.

In more Snap news, a new report from The Information today highlighted the company’s early struggles in the hardware game. The company last year unveiled the Spectacles, its first foray into hardware. Despite Spectacles being incredibly hard to come by at first, interest has reportedly waned and left Snap with “hundreds of thousands” of unsold units.

Snap badly overestimated demand for its Spectacles and now has hundreds of thousands of unsold units sitting in warehouses, either fully assembled or in parts, according to two people close to the company. The disclosure undercuts Snap CEO Evan Spiegel’s recent contention that Spectacles sales of more than 150,000 had topped the company’s expectations.

Snap has been relatively quiet on hardware efforts thus far, though CEO Evan Spiegel did compare early performance of the Spectacles to the iPod. That comparison seems even more outrageous now than it did then.

The young company has 150 people working on its hardware efforts, though it’s not explicitly clear what that team is actually doing. Snap was said to have a drone in the works, but today’s report says those efforts have been scrapped.

What comes of Snap’s hardware efforts remains to be seen, but things certainly don’t look good right now. On the other hand, Snapchat has a pretty sweet Halloween costume, if that falls into its ‘hardware’ efforts….


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Avatar for Chance Miller Chance Miller

Chance is an editor for the entire 9to5 network and covers the latest Apple news for 9to5Mac.

Tips, questions, typos to chance@9to5mac.com