Snapchat is still growing where it matters most

What a difference a year makes. This time last year, Snap had just reported its second straight quarter of negative user growth fueled by a buggy Android app and an unpopular redesign. 

This year has been a different story.

Snap reported its third quarter results for 2019, revealing that it added 7 million new users and brought in $446 million in revenue — both well ahead of analysts’ expectations for the company. 

Snapchat’s daily active users grew to 210 million, up from 203 million last quarter. That’s a smaller jump than the previous quarter, when the app added 13 million new users thanks in large part to its viral “gender swap” filter. 

As with last quarter, much of the growth came from outside of North America and Europe, where Snap added a million new users each. The company has credited its rebuilt Android app with boosting growth outside of the U.S., where iPhones are more dominant.

“Following the rebuild of our Android app, Snapchat is now more performant on a wider variety of devices, and we have been working on localization and other efforts to create a better user experience across international markets,” Spiegel said during a call with investors. 

“This has helped us substantially increase the rate at which we onboard new Android users who not only download Snapchat but also use it on an ongoing basis to talk with their friends, contributing to our daily active user growth.”

Spiegel again touted Snapchat’s high engagement and its “significant lead” in augmented reality. He noted that “each daily active user opens Snapchat 30 times per day on average,” and that each daily user is “interacting with augmented reality nearly 30 times every day on average.”

Later on the call, Snap’s CFO Derek Andersen said the company sees “significant potential” in augmented reality advertising.

Spiegel also called out the company’s nascent hardware business as an important pieces of the company’s AR strategy. Snapchat’s upcoming Spectacles 3 will be “an important building block for our augmented reality technology,” he said. At the same time, though, he made it clear that Snap doesn’t expect to sell very many of the glasses. 

“We are building low volumes of Spectacles 3 and using this iteration to test and learn more about wearable computing.”