Download Snapchat On My Macbook Air

Bring all messengers into one

How Do I Download Snapchat On My Macbook Air
Download Snapchat On My Macbook Air

Snapchat articles on MacRumors.com. Users of Reddit's official iOS app can now share text, link and image-based posts to Snapchat thanks to a new Share Sheet integration in iOS 13 (via TechCrunch). Life's more fun when you live in the moment:) Download Snapchat for iOS and Android and start Snapping with friends today.

IM+ keeps all your chats within one handy Mac app.

What is Snapchat after all? Snapchat is a fun instant messaging app with a twist — it's built around the idea of connecting with your friends without leaving a lot of digital baggage on the web by only making its messages available for so long after they are sent. This makes it the most popular app among teenagers who don't want to leave an embarrassing record of their youth (don't you wish something similar was available in the time of MySpace or LiveJournal?).

Snapchat's co-founder Evan Spiegel said that his app is a solution to the stress of social media, where people have to worry about the longevity of their digital presence — something he noticed by observing 'emergency detagging of Facebook photos before job interviews and photoshopping blemishes out of candid shots before they hit the internet.'

All messengers you need in one place

If you don’t want to bother yourself with multiple app installations, get Setapp instead. It has every messenger tool, and beyond.

An innovator in many areas, Snapchat pioneered the use of 'stories' — short messages or videos that delete themselves shortly after being posted. Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and many others have since successfully copied the feature, which has now almost become innate to social media.

Although other social apps are nibbling at Snapchat's audience, the app still boasts a huge user base and engagement scores:

Snapchat has nearly 200 million daily users. In 2019 the number went down slightly to about 181 million from 190 million in 2018, which is nonetheless impressive
As of March 2019, Snapchat has reached 90% of 13–24 year olds in the US
On average, users spend around 30 minutes in the app every day
Snapchat's revenues have increased in 2019, painting a positive future for the app
The Snapchat mascot — a cute ghost — is nicknamed Ghostface Chilla after the famous rapper Ghostface Killa

In a nutshell, Snapchat is here to stay. So whether you’re a long-time Snapchatter or are befuddled by the phenomenon and want to get on board, you may be looking for some information on how to get Snapchat on Mac. But can you use snapchat on a Mac at all?

How To Get Snapchat On Mac Quickly

Right now, you might be asking 'how to download Snapchat for Mac?' It's a reasonable question, but unfortunately there's no official Snapchat for Mac just yet. Snapchat has very deliberately kept its app on mobile to ensure it stays fun and disposable — you're not supposed to Photoshop your snaps, for example. The whole idea is to take a quick photo or video, send it to your friends, and forget about it.

Nevertheless, there are still lots of reasons you might want to have Snapchat on Mac. Maybe you find your phone too distracting but still want to connect with friends. Maybe you run a business and want to promote it on Snapchat but find using the phone too limiting. Or maybe you don't have a smartphone at all (no judgement) or it's currently broken.

Whatever the reason for installing Snapchat on computer might be, don't despair — there are certain tricks for how to use Snapchat on Mac worth noting.

Get BlueStacks for Mac: The Snapchat emulator

BlueStacks is a Mac app that lets you turn your laptop into an Android device — at least for one window. That means any app available on Android also becomes available on your Mac, with just a few simple steps in between. That also means you can get Snapchat for Mac without much effort at all. Let's discuss in detail.

Download BlueStacks for Mac

Naturally, to use BlueStacks you need to download it first:

Head over to bluestacks.com and hit Download BlueStacks
Run the .dmg installer from your Downloads folder
Follow the prompts to enable the necessary access level for the app

Done. That's why BlueStacks for Mac is the most simple and intuitive Snapchat emulator around.

How to link your Google Account

As BlueStacks is an Android emulator, you need to have a Google Account to download apps from the Google Play Store, including Snapchat. Don't worry, it's absolutely free.

When you launch BlueStacks for the first time, it'll walk you through the sign-in process:

Click on the Google Play Store icon
Sign-in with your Google Account or create a new one

Once you have an account linked to BlueStacks, you'll be able to use a fully functioning Android device right in your MacBook. And as your computer is more powerful than an average Android phone, the apps are likely to run even faster and in higher definition in BlueStacks for Mac — great choice for gaming and power-intensive apps. But let’s get back to Snapchat on Mac once again.

How to download Snapchat on Mac

If you've ever used Android before then downloading Snapchat on Mac using BlueStacks will not be a problem. But even in case you're unfamiliar with Android — it's not rocket science. All you need to do is click on the Google Play Store icon.

The Google Play Store is like the App Store for Android devices, with lots of great stuff to explore. To start, let's download Snapchat on MacBook:

Click on the search bar of the Play Store
Type 'Snapchat' and hit enter
Choose Snapchat from the list of results and click 'Download and Install'

Once Snapchat is fully installed, you can access it from the Android home screen in BlueStacks. The app is fully functional and will even detect your webcam so that you can start snapping right away.

That’s pretty much everything you need to know about how to use Snapchat on Mac with BlueStacks.

How to get Snapchat on Mac without BlueStacks

Some of you might be wondering if it's possible to use Snapchat on a Mac without BlueStacks, for example, to view Snapchat online? Unfortunately, there aren't any other ways to use Snapchat on Mac officially yet. Apple does seem to have plans to bring Snapchat to the App Store, but given that there isn't a set release date as of now you shouldn't expect it anytime soon.

In the meantime, if you don't want to bother with a Snapchat emulator there are other instant messaging apps for your Mac that might fill the void.

How Do I Download Snapchat On My Macbook Air

IM+ is another great app for your Mac, which combines all of your messaging services in a single interface. You can manage your Facebook Messenger, Slack, Instagram, WhatsApp, Tinder, and LinkedIn from IM+ with ease instead of juggling countless tabs in your browser to communicate with friends and coworkers.

Most importantly, IM+ supports a relatively new Snapchat service called Snap Map, which allows you to see where your friends are at any given moment. Currently, that's the closest to Snapchat you can get. And even if Snapchat releases its app for Mac in the future, you can be sure that IM+ will support it right away.

Uplet is the best way to use Instagram on your Mac. The tool allows you to create and share permanent posts to Instagram as well as manage multiple accounts at once. In a word — a complete Instagram experience.

Built with intuitive design in mind, Uplet is all about a single yet very powerful functionality — bulk uploading content to Instagram. It's a wonderful tool for both private use and business account management, while it allows you to share lots of content at once.

Get an Instagram client for Mac

Download Uplet, a dedicated Instagram app that allows you to post photos and videos directly to your Instagram account from Mac.

Best of all, both Uplet and IM+ are available for a no-strings-attached unlimited 7-day trial through Setapp, a Mac platform with over 180 social, productive, and utilitarian apps for your everyday life. Crucially, Uplet and IM+ will ensure you won't ever get cut off from your friends, even for a minute.

Setapp lives on Mac and iOS. Please come back from another device.

Meantime, prepare for all the awesome things you can do with Setapp.

Read on

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When an app becomes as popular as Snapchat has, there begins to be some expectation that it’ll grow to support more platforms than what it started out on. Sadly, there’s still no way to run Snapchat natively on Macs (or Windows PCs, for that matter), but Appamatix is here with a step-by-step guide that will show you how to get a version of Snapchat up and running on your Macbook, Macbook Pro, or iMac. It’s easy, it’s direct, and if you’re worried about the legality of this workaround, you don’t need to be!

To say that Snapchat’s popularity has exploded across its homes on Android devices and iPhones would be something of an understatement. It’s truly the only app of its kind, and if you haven’t signed up for it yet (or worse, haven’t even heard of it) then I applaud your ability to escape the zeitgeist that is the world of social media.

Snapchat, at its heart, is a messaging app, but it’s built upon media in a unique way that goes beyond taking and sharing pictures and videos. Whereas Instagram and Facebook feature social media feeds that are both persistent and somewhat static (unless someone chooses to delete a post), Snapchat media is fleeting. When you take a “Snap” and choose to send it to your contacts, then it’s already been given a short time to live; Snaps last between 3 to 10 seconds, only, and once they’ve been viewed by an individual, they’re gone for good. There are ways to save Snaps for short periods of time, but by and large, the media that makes up Snapchat is meant to be fast and quickly digestible; just like the moments in your life that they’re taken from! The app encourages creativity and allows you to use lenses, filters, stickers, and other fun, fast markup tools to add special effects to your Snaps before sending them.

There are further nuances to explore in the app, however, but that’s the heart of the Snapchat experience, and it has been since the app’s inception. Recently, however, Snapchat has expanded its feature set to include those tools most often reserved for more straightforward messages services. It now allows you to make video and audio calls between your contacts, and the direct messaging system can almost serve as a replacement to your standard SMS text messaging if you want it to.

Snapchat in 2016, then, is something of a workhorse, and it has more form and function than many apps that reach this height of popularity. One might also think that this would have led to it growing onto other platforms, such as Windows or Mac OS X, but sadly, that hasn’t been the case. It’s understandable to those of us who’ve used Snapchat–it just wouldn’t work as well on laptop or desktop computer. It’s meant to be as mobile and active as you are, and for the most part, it succeeds at that when it’s on Android devices and iPhones.

That doesn’t mean there’s no way to accomplish that, though; we have a tried and true method of bringing Snapchat into the computer, and it’s called emulation.

Emulating Snapchat

We’ve written about emulators–specifically Android emulators–many times before on Appamatix. Still, in spite of how often we cover them, they’re by no means a mainstream type of software that everyone is already accustomed to. For many, emulators are a new thing entirely.

When you run an emulator, you’re using your computer’s resources to simulate a virtual environment that’s identical to a different operating system. In this case, we’ll be using your Mac’s resources to emulate the Android operating system, which is going to allow us to emulate the Android version of Snapchat. If it sounds complicated, don’t worry–it’s actually remarkably simple. All that we’re going to have to do is find the right emulator for you, which isn’t a difficult task since the majority of emulation software applications don’t differ too wildly from each other.

Many people wonder why we aren’t just emulating iOS since we’re going to be running it on a Mac. The answer lies in Apple’s proprietary software and hardware, which makes any Apple software extremely difficult to emulate. Since this type of software is all third-party developed, it’s understandable that they’d choose a more flexible operating system from which to run apps–like Android!

Finding the Right Emulator

The right emulator is the one that appeals the most to you, but while all of them differ slightly, they all perform the same basic function–to create a virtual Android OS from which you can run apps. Some of them have paid options, but most of them are entirely free.

Bluestacksis the most popular emulator out there, and usually one of the first that I highly recommend for new users. It’s user-friendly, marketed well, and very simple to get started with. As you’ll see from the website, it’s primarily marketed towards Android gamers, but it can handle almost any Android app that you throw at it. The base version is free, but a meager subscription fee will remove the accompanying third-party advertising software.
When not recommending the above choice, I tell people to go with Andyroid, which is my personal go-to emulator. I enjoy its minimalistic aesthetic and speedy updates. It also comes with a handy system tray manager (aptly titled “Handy Andy”) that will allow you to manage settings on the fly.
If you’re not able to freely install software on your computer, then Manymo is probably the right choice for you. It’s a browser-based emulator that requires no software installation but does require you to have the .apk (application) file of any apps that you want to use. These are easily found through a quick Google search. The free version of Manymo gives you 10 limited duration uses per month, but a $9.99 subscription fee allows you a great deal more usage.

The list could go on and on, but we’ll leave it at that, for now. Any of these three emulators will work just fine for accessing Snapchat, so check them out! Bluestacks and Andyroid are very easy to download and install on your computer, while Manymo will remain rooted to your browser.

Snapchat on Your Mac

Once you have your emulator installed, there are only two other things you’re going to be required to have before we proceed.

You need to have a Google account in order to sign into the Google Play store on your emulator. This can be had by setting up a free Gmail email address.
Set up a Snapchat profile from your smartphone, where Snapchat is meant to run natively. If you already have a Snapchat account in the works, you’re going to have an easier time emulating it.

Once you have those two things, boot up your emulator! It probably looks very similar to an Android home screen, and for all intents and purposes, that’s exactly what we’re going to treat it like. Go ahead and click over to the Google Play store and search for “Snapchat.” It’ll be the first app to show up in your search query, and should be easy to download and install in your emulator.

After that, it’s a simple matter of signing into your Snapchat account and getting started with the app as you normally would–this time, from the comfort of your Mac! You’ll have access to all of Snapchat’s features since the emulators above all have microphone and camera support.

Of course, most of your Snapchat activity is probably going to take place on a smartphone. Since the app was designed to run natively on mobile devices, most of its features tend to cater to those types of features most readily available on Android devices and iPhones. Still, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t plenty of fun to be had when you’re running Snapchat on your Mac, especially since the apps developers have recently added so many handy messaging and calling features.

Keep in mind that you’re probably only going to remain signed in on one device at a time, which means that you’ll need to do a little bit of maneuvering each time you want to switch from one device to another. This is only a small obstacle, however, for the level of accessibility that you’ve given yourself with an emulator.