Facebook Is Reportedly Planning to Secretly Copy Snap's Bitmoji
Facebook is reportedly coming up with their own version of Bitmoji, a service that provides animated, personalized cartoon avatars for users. Bitmoji is owned by Snap, the company behind Snapchat, and Facebook's initial plans to copy the feature was leaked when a developer found some interesting evidence after digging into the latest Android app.
These prototypes, as found by Jane Manchun Wong, a developer well-known for her previous discoveries after digging into mobile apps, is now known as "Facebook Avatars." Wong posted her discoveries on social media earlier last week, along with some preview screenshots of the upcoming feature.
These findings were not easy to dig out, often requiring Wong to do some "reverse engineering" of the mobile apps, which often involve wrestling with "cryptic machine code" according to Wong via the Business Insider.
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Looking at the screenshots of the "Facebook Avatars" feature that Wong came up with, Facebook is supposedly putting out their new avatar feature as a "whole new way to express yourself on Facebook," according to a caption.
The shots also showed a placeholder for ways to "comment with stickers" and add "stickers in chat" which might be used in a Facebook messenger group and private chat.
The avatars that were featured in the Android package that Wong dissected also looked similar to Bitmoji's cartoonish and exaggerated versions, with options to edit them, not too different from the way Snap's Bitmoji users are now able to customize their cartoon identities.
Facebook did not deny that they are building "Facebook Avatars," having told Tech Crunch that they are looking into the feature as a way to help their users on their platform.
"We're looking into more ways to help people express themselves on Facebook," a representative said. The feature is still in its infancy, however, and the company has not yet revealed any plans to put out the avatars for public testing as of this time.
There's the possibility that Facebook will use their Facebook Spaces avatars, the same one they use in their Virtual Reality previews earlier last year, as a way to help users get started with an avatar based on their photo or video.
Bitmoji and its emoji avatar feature have proved extremely popular once Snapchat has added the feature to its app, letting users customize their cartoon avatars and add them to Snapchat posts as stickers. It was the top iOS free app back in February, beating out Snapchat and even Facebook during that time.
Snapchat, in turn, has expanded the role of Bitmoji avatars from mere stickers. Snapchat users can now use their Bitmoji pics as their profile pic, as well as their online indicator in message thread and even as 3D avatars that they can pose and move around in their Snap stories.
