Pod Insights The Vergecast The Razr Ultra proves flip phones are almost ready About this episode 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 [email protected] !) about a possible outcome for Chrome after the Google search trial ends.
Further reading:
Motorola Razr Ultra (2025) review: looking sharp
The best folding phones you can buy
Android’s youthful new design language just dropped
Snapchat scraps ‘simple’ redesign as it loses users in North America
Zuckerberg offered to buy Snapchat for $6 billion.
Evan Spiegel explains why Snap is betting on Spectacles
Breaking down the DOJ’s plan to end Google’s search monopoly
Why are companies lining up to buy Chrome?
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Transcript 13,590 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:03 David Pierce? Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of really important technology with absolutely no business model. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am somewhere in the woods in the mountains of Virginia. This is the week every year that is Mother's Day, my wife's birthday, our wedding anniversary, and this year, her grad school graduation, congrats Anna, all in the span of seven days. So we try to get away, we try to have some fun, and this time it was go sit in the woods and just be quiet. It's been lovely, can't recommend it enough, but that is not what we're here to talk about today. Today, we're going to do two things on the show. First, we're going to talk about a couple of really important new devices. And by new devices, I mean flip phones.
0:45 David Pierce? The new Motorola Razr Ultra is out, Allison Johnson reviewed it, we're going to talk about that, and we're also going to talk a little bit about whether this is finally the year of flip phones. Then Alex Heath is going to come on, and we're going to talk about Snapchat, we're going to talk about WhatsApp, and we're going to talk about whether letting people talk to each other is actually a tech business that even exists. We also have a really fun question on the Vergecast hotline, lots of stuff to do, all of that is coming up in just a sec, but first, I have, I'm going to be honest, just like a tiny bit more celebrating to do, and also, I have not yet baked a cake, so I gotta go bake a cake. Wish me luck. This is The Vergecast, we'll be right back.
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1:46 David Pierce? Welcome back. Allison Johnson is here. Hi Allison.
1:49 Speaker 02 Hello.
1:50 David Pierce? I've seen a lot of you recently, for reasons I both can and cannot explain yet, and this is very exciting. It's nice to see you.
1:56 Speaker 02 It's good, it's a good addition to my life. I don't, I don't know.
2:00 David Pierce? So there are two Androidy things I want to talk about. One is kind of the like, big picture Android 16 material, three cool kid, young people design. But first, I want to talk about the Razr.
2:16 Speaker 02 Yes.
2:16 David Pierce? Because you and I might be the only people on earth who believe in flip phones. But I still believe in flip phones.
2:23 Speaker 02 Yes, I do too.
2:24 David Pierce? You reviewed the new Razr Ultra, which is like the high end flip phone.
2:30 Speaker 02 Mm hmm.
2:31 David Pierce? What was the verdict? How'd you feel?
2:33 Speaker 02 It's so beautiful. Like, I can't emphasize this enough. Like, I don't get to say this a lot. They're shaped like phones. They look like phones. You know, we've like settled on a thing for phones. This is a gorgeous phone. So the Ultra comes in the like fancier finishes. They're all kind of fun. There's the regular Razr and then the Razr Plus. This one has the wood panel back, maybe because I made such a stink about it. Motorola knew that that's what I wanted. It's gorgeous. It's not a huge departure or huge evolution of the Razr, I would say, from last year. Like, there's some upgraded specs.
3:15 Speaker 02 You get the Snapdragon 8 Elite processor, which is just the most amount of firepower you can throw at a phone right now. It has like a slightly bigger interior screen than the other two. It has a seven inch display. It's a little bit higher resolution. And you get upgraded cameras. There's an upgraded like 50 megapixel main camera, an ultra wide, and then a 50 megapixel selfie camera.
3:42 David Pierce? The cameras, by the way, seems like a super big deal to me because I think one of the reasons I was excited about this phone in the first place is it's one of the first flip phones I can think of where you don't look at the spec sheet and immediately see some glaring deficiency. That is like, in theory, this is just a very good phone that also happens to be a flip phone. It's not like the Samsung stuff, it always has worse cameras than the the normal candy bar phones. There's always some issue. And the Ultra seems like it's it's the first one with like a feature complete spec sheet, which is very exciting to me.
4:18 Speaker 02 It is. I would say it's like, it has closed the gap more than any other flip phone, for sure.
4:25 David Pierce? But it's not all the way there.
4:26 Speaker 02 Yeah, just the thing is like they called it Ultra, which already, you know, you're you're setting, you're making your bed when you call a phone Ultra.
4:36 David Pierce? Fair.
4:36 Speaker 02 And the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra exists. It costs thirteen hundred dollars. And if you want to get into like, what, how much phone can you get for thirteen hundred dollars? You can get a phone with so many cameras, you know, and like, an amazing display. Like, if you want to get into that, there's still kind of, we're not quite at like parity, I guess. But this does feel like they're like, we shoved as much as we can in here. I found the battery life was like, real good, honestly, which is.
5:08 David Pierce? Nice.
5:09 Speaker 02 Yeah, is a concern for a flip phone because they are secretly just like two small phones like strapped together. Yeah, it it feels more than ever before. Like, if you have been thinking about a flip phone and kind of put off by like, yeah, you know, but I want a little more. I don't want to give up so much. This, you don't have to give up quite so much this time around.
5:32 David Pierce? Yeah, or, or, or having just increasingly more ideas. And some of those ideas seem to be good and some of them seem to be bad. But I feel like the the two pieces of it that I most want to talk about are the outside screen, which I think my impression has been Motorola has kind of done the most of the flip phone manufacturers in terms of like what you can actually do on the outside screen. And then we have to talk about AI. But let's talk about that later because I don't want to. Uh, the outside screen, what has has Motorola like continued to kind of dial in what you can do with the phone closed?
6:05 Speaker 02 Yeah, and and I think for my money, they they're ahead. And I have to apologize to the flip phones that are not sold in the US. I don't really get to play with those. So I'm really kind of basing this on experience versus the Samsung C Flip 6.
6:21 David Pierce? Sure.
6:22 Speaker 02 Motorola just makes it super inviting and really easy to enable apps on the outer display. There's little games, which I normally shrug off. I was like, I don't want to play a little marble game. But I handed the marble game to my child, to my three year old, and he friggin loves it. And he's actually kind of good at it. So like. That's been a weird little bonus feature where I just hand him the phone and it's closed and he has a little marble game moment. But they they make it really easy. There's a new like widget panels, so you can kind of get even more like into customization for it. The um, just like the media player is cute.
7:05 Speaker 02 You can make it a tape deck and the the little tape reels like move as the music is playing. I just it it's fun. Yeah, I love it.
7:14 David Pierce? The the thing I've been trying to decide with all of the outside screens on flip phones is whether their job is to be like a worse phone or if their job is to be more like a smartwatch where it's like simple controls, but you can't actually do very much, right? Like you you hit one button at a time and that's kind of it.
7:34 Speaker 02 Yeah.
7:35 David Pierce? What's what's your read on sort of in day to day use, how you want the outer screen to work?
7:41 Speaker 02 I think it's somewhere in the middle. I kind of started with like the flip phone has a little smartwatch on the front and that's cool and fun and you can do quick things. I end up doing a lot more than that on this phone. I actually had my digital boarding pass for my flight on there and I pulled it out and had the um, the gate agent scan it and he was like, that's a cute little phone. I was like, oh, he doesn't know. It's two phones in one. But I like I enable a lot of apps so I can just fully open up Strava. I can choose my activity, start my bike ride and then just like put the phone away in my pocket. Have I saved some kind of amazing amount of time or is it that much more convenient?
8:26 Speaker 02 I think it's like a an emotional like mental thing where I don't feel like I I had to like dive into my whole phone and look at every notification. Um, so for me, it's really, it's really somewhere in the middle. I respond to texts, I'll use the little keyboard. It's kind of janky, but it's perfect for just like, hey, on my way or those kind of things. So it can be less if you want it to be, but for me, I've kind of crept towards like, it's a cute little phone when I want it.
8:56 David Pierce? Hmm. Can you do things like open settings and get to the notification shade? And like, if you want sort of the full phone experience on the front screen, can you get it?
9:07 Speaker 02 You can get a lot, yeah. It has its own kind of built in UI for there's a, the notifications panel and you can swipe through that like you normally would. There's quick settings and, and all that stuff. You can run any app you want and you just have to tap through a, an alert that says like, hey, this might suck. And sometimes it really does.
9:32 Speaker 02 But yeah, it's like Motorola is very like, it's your world. You can do what you want with this and I love that.
9:39 David Pierce? Yeah, that feels like mostly the right answer. There is a little part of me that is like, there should be a set of things that it protects you from in a certain way, where it's like, uh, the, the notification shade is an interesting one, right? Cause I feel like it should, I want it to show me the notification that like just buzzed in my pocket, but I actually feel like I want to have to open the phone in order to go get the rest of my notifications.
10:02 Speaker 02 Oh.
10:02 David Pierce? Because there, there's just that, that little tiny bit of added friction feels like it's useful. And again, it's, it's the thing you're describing that I think I find so charming about flip phones in the first place is that like, when I go to a text message, making it a literal physical activity I have to do in order to then go open Instagram is going to prevent me from opening Instagram.
10:23 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
10:23 David Pierce? And I, I think like that, that's probably still true in this case, just because the front screen is small enough and not quite good enough to really be a good Instagram experience. But I do feel like dialing in that sort of, how do we give you all the things to do without then just sort of letting you into your phone unless you open the phone? It feels like that's the balance. I don't know that anybody has quite dialed in.
10:45 Speaker 02 Yeah. And it's a little bit of like personal responsibility because Instagram is a hundred percent the one I will like mindlessly tap on a notification from the outer screen and it'll be like. You want to open Instagram? Like, I haven't enabled it for the outer screen. And I'm like, oh, no, no, no, I don't actually. And then I like back away. Like, the social media apps, really, I've kept off the front screen. It would be a bad experience using them. You could, if you wanted to, but I have maintained that as my barrier of like, I'm not going to cross this line. I'm going to have to make a conscious decision to open the phone if I want to check on Instagram.
11:26 David Pierce? Yeah, and that's an okay balance, that you can set that up for yourself feels like a good. That's an okay way to do it.
11:30 Speaker 02 Yeah.
11:31 David Pierce? Tell me about the AI stuff. I think Motorola, again, has just a lot of ideas about what AI is supposed to do on your phone.
11:38 Speaker 02 Yeah, it was a little overwhelming. I'm still like, reserving a little bit of judgment because I want to live with some of this stuff a little bit longer. But, so they have introduced something called Moto AI, which is really just, there's an app on the phone, and it's kind of a dashboard for all these AI features that live alongside Gemini in every piece of AI that Google had shoved into Android. But Moto AI is like a handful of things. There's Catch Me Up, which will summarize your recent notifications from messaging apps.
12:16 David Pierce? Is Motorola better at this than Apple is?
12:20 Speaker 02 Yes, you know what? I think it's a good, well, yes and no. Because it can only do the messaging app. So I'm like, Catch Me Up. And I have a bunch of emails that I really need to get into. And it's just like, you didn't get any texts in the last hour.
12:33 David Pierce? Yeah. Is that even solving? I don't feel like my notification overload is my messaging apps. Like, that's not the problem I'm having.
12:40 Speaker 02 That's where I'm hung up on it. I like that it's, you opt in. You're like, I need this at this moment. And it makes me more irritated with the Apple alternative, which is like, we're going to give you a weird little summary of every single notification. Might be wrong, too. You got to double check it. So there's that. There is something called Remember This, which you can, it's a little pixel screenshots-ish, because you can screenshot a website. You can take a picture of something. You can just write yourself a little text note, and it'll save it and kind of catalog it in the way of AI reading it and tagging it. And then you ask the Moto AI later, like, hey, what time is my flight tomorrow? And
13:25 Speaker 02 Um, in my experience, it was good with that stuff. It didn't go hallucinate another flight out of another airport.
13:33 David Pierce? That's good, yeah.
13:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, um, but has that catch where you have to remember to add stuff to it?
13:39 David Pierce? Right, but I will say, I think that is a very cool sort of overall idea. This idea of like, you just need a place to dump stuff that you encounter on your phone.
13:48 Speaker 02 Yeah.
13:49 David Pierce? You know, you screenshot a text message or you see a recipe or whatever, and you just sort of dump it all somewhere that you can like access and query later. I think is the right idea. I'm not super sold on the idea that every phone manufacturer should make this for themselves. I feel like this is better as like a cross-platform thing tied to an account that I already have, instead of all living on my phone. But this still feels like that in terms of like phone AI stuff actually feels sort of directionally correct to me. In the same way that I think pixel screenshots is like a very good idea.
14:19 Speaker 02 Exactly. There's so many times I end up with a thing where I'm like, where do I put this? Like this, I don't want to just leave it. I don't like, want to put it in a weird Chrome bookmarks folder that I've forgotten exists. And yeah, so that's one of the things that like, this feels promising. Um, want to use it a little more. Uh, and then, then there's like an AI voice, you know, recorder. Then it makes a transcription, sort of like you want it to pay attention in a meeting. Um, you do that kind of thing.
14:49 David Pierce? Motorola really just trying to do pixel stuff here, it sounds like.
14:52 Speaker 02 A little bit, yeah. And it, it gets a little AI overload with the, the fact that Gemini and all that stuff is on here. But also like, they've tried to make it like very obvious how to interact with their AI. So there's like a little floating bubble on the screen that will get you to the AI. There's the Moto AI app, which is like right in the middle of the home screen. The Ultra has an AI button on the side. So you like long press it or um, short press it and get into the AI. There's also ways to like prop up the phone, have the front screen kind of facing you, and you can like approach it and the AI will start listening.
15:34 David Pierce? Weird.
15:34 Speaker 02 Yeah, it was all a little much. I did, I tried the propping up thing and then I just felt like the phone was watching me, so I.
15:42 David Pierce? Yeah, so the idea is like you have it on your desk or whatever, and then you walk up to it. Like the, what was it? The Echo Show does this, right? Where it'll, it'll change the interface when you get close to it.
15:49 Speaker 02 Right.
15:50 David Pierce? But instead it's an AI assistant being like, what's up?
15:52 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah.
15:53 David Pierce? I don't like that at all.
15:54 Speaker 02 The little glowing borders going, I'm like, what does that mean? Is it listening? Is it waiting for me?
15:59 David Pierce? No, thank you. No, no.
16:01 Speaker 02 Didn't super love it.
16:03 David Pierce? I do feel like Motorola is in a category I would put a lot of other companies in that I don't necessarily blame it for, but they're just so deep on the AI thing that it's like, we have to overplay our hand on this. That it's like, we can't be chill about the AI. We can't just have you discovered over time. We have to just put it in front of you no matter where you are all the time. And this is like early Samsung mistakes, right? Where for years, every time you would do anything, the little pop up would appear and Samsung would be like, did you know that Milk Music exists? And you'd be like, I don't care, Samsung. Like, I'm good. I do know this and I'm not interested in knowing this information.
16:43 David Pierce? And my hope is, give it another generation or two and they will stop feeling the need to beat you over the head with AI exists in quite the same way. But it is, everybody is kind of overshooting their actual usefulness with a lot of this stuff. That said, I do think the button is a good idea.
17:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, the button I don't hate. I wish you could reprogram it to do something else. They don't let you do that.
17:09 David Pierce? It should be like the iPhone's action button. Like even if you start it as an AI thing, but sort of let me turn it into something else, fine.
17:15 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, like, we would like you to use it for AI, but you know, it's your world. Yeah, and I kind of sympathize with Motorola in that like, they're asking you to like, create some new behaviors with your phone and you have to take a minute and think like, how do we get to the AI? Or if I want to put this and remember this, what am I doing? So they've kind of put it everywhere. I feel like an attempt to be like, here you go. But yeah, it just gets a little bit like AI overload pretty quickly.
17:46 David Pierce? That's fair. So I'm going to ask you the question I ask you every year around this time. Is this the year of the flip phone?
17:53 Speaker 02 Man.
17:53 David Pierce? We're gonna get at least another one from Samsung.
17:56 Speaker 02 Yeah.
17:57 David Pierce? Sounds like the the flip iPhone, which is probably gonna be a fold iPhone, which I would like to be on the record as saying is a bad decision. Is is a ways out. But like, it it feels like at the very least, we are getting to the point where you can credibly say this phone is as good as the other phones you might buy, and also it's a flip phone. Like, we're we're almost there, and that feels important.
18:18 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's closer than it's ever been. I think if you've been on the fence about a flip phone and you're pretty sure it's a good idea for you, actually, someone in the comments had a good suggestion that you could get one of the like low end razors on a prepaid number for like 250 bucks or something.
18:38 David Pierce? Oh, that's a good idea.
18:39 Speaker 02 Try that out, see if you like it, and then that might be a good way to, you know, get your feet wet without jumping into a $1,300 phone. That like, the couple of things that I hesitate about on the Motorola and all the flip phones right now, there there's no dust protection. There's like teeny tiny particle protection, it's IP48. But it's still kind of like, I would be a little more careful with this phone than a regular slab phone. I handed it to my three year old and he put his fingers all over the inner screen like I was, I didn't go easy on this thing. But that's a little bit of a hesitation. I am also a little annoyed with Motorola's software policy.
19:23 Speaker 02 They haven't been like, super great about ruling out software versions in a timely fashion. They support it for not quite as many years as Samsung. I think they do three OS versions and then four years of security updates, which is like
19:39 David Pierce? Not as good as its competitors.
19:41 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's okay, like, it'll it'll get most people as far as they want to go with this phone, probably. But yeah, we're getting there. I'm like, if you if you are pretty sure a flip phone is for you, like, it is a great year for the flip phone.
19:55 David Pierce? Yeah, I was excited to, I got to try yours for a minute. And we're also still at the point where like, there is a crease, if you look for it, in the inside screen. But it's, it continues to go away. Like, which is, which is nice. Like, even after a couple of minutes of using it, I didn't really notice it anymore. It's still very tall. And it is still not quite as good a screen as you get when it's just a regular pane of glass. But like you said, we're getting there. The gap gets smaller and smaller every year, it seems.
20:25 Speaker 02 Yeah.
20:25 David Pierce? I'm very excited to see what Samsung does, because from a hardware perspective, Samsung has been out in front of this for a long time, and I think might, might still be the one to get us there.
20:36 Speaker 02 Yeah.
20:38 David Pierce? But we'll see. That's coming later. So before I let you go, let's talk about the Android 16 stuff for just a minute. What do you make of this? We talked a little bit about this on Friday's show, but there's a new design language for Android. It's very like vibrant and bouncy and colorful. There's a new font. What do you think? What do you make of all this?
20:56 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think it's fun. They're calling this Material 3 Expressive. It's a big update that's gonna be in Android, in Android 16. It's gonna be in the beta later this month. And we got kind of a little preview of it when Google accidentally posted a blog kind of explaining the rationale behind the design. You know, Google leaking Google stuff is a tale as old as time.
21:21 David Pierce? It's a true tradition of this time of year, yeah.
21:24 Speaker 02 Right. But there's just a real emphasis in the kind of the appearance of it. It's very like, they talk about the springy animations and the fonts are bolder, the colors are bolder. You know, there's new icon shapes and everything about it is just screams like youth, like hello fellow kids kind of thing.
21:50 David Pierce? Do you think that's the right call? I mean, put that next to everything we've seen about what's coming in iOS, which is like very pared down and simple. And they're, they're doing a similar kind of like layered, three dimensional thing, but it's much more like spaceship-y and glassy and pristine. Android is going all the other way and they're just like, get really weird with what all of this looks like. Do you think that, is that the right call for Android? These things were, were pushing towards each other for so long. iOS and Android were looking more and more like every year. And now it feels like in a pretty big way, they are absolutely breaking back apart.
22:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think, yeah, maybe it is kind of just the nature and then they're gonna split apart and come back together again at some point. But I, in my mind, I think, yeah, make it look different. iOS has such a stranglehold on the US market and especially among young people. I think we already studied last year where like 88% of teenagers have an iPhone or something like that. So this feels like an attempt to address that market. And there's a little bit of like inherent cringiness, I think, when a big company sort of approaches a younger demographic and is like, look, we speak your language.
23:07 David Pierce? How do you do fellow kids is such a sick burn, but also like exactly right. You are correct about that.
23:12 Speaker 02 But not, not to kind of dismiss it all as like, oh, they're just trying to like pander to Gen Z. I think it's, it's good to refresh things. And it seems like they've put a lot of thought into like, how do we make this more usable for everybody? And, and I think making something that looks like an, an iOS clone is, wouldn't be a smart move right now. I think leaning into the difference of like, yeah, this is not an iPhone. This is something else. It, you can make it purple and pink if you want and it looks cool.
23:47 David Pierce? Are you a customizer, by the way? One of the things I've been thinking about a lot with this is that there is this big push toward letting you do whatever you want with your phone. And I keep trying to figure out how to put that next to the thing that we have known and said for forever, which is that defaults are the only thing that matter. Right? And so I'm like, is this, am I giving these companies too much credit for giving people more customization tools that statistically speaking, they're never going to use? Or is there something to the idea that actually these things are becoming more personal and more versatile and what we should be giving people is more knobs and buttons and options to mess with?
24:23 Speaker 02 Yeah, maybe it's a good moment to try it, I think. Cause yeah, I think in the past, like, I don't super customize my phone. I play around with all the options. I pick one of the color palettes and material you and and then I, I'm like, this looks weird and I just go back to the regular one. But maybe kind of as the, as the hardware has just hit a point where, you know, flip phones and folding phones aside, they all look the same, like a Samsung phone, looks like an iPhone, looks like a
24:56 David Pierce? Yeah.
24:57 Speaker 02 Pixel, unless you're looking at the camera bump. So maybe that's kind of right for like, we'll do something fun and different in the software and people might, might actually try these things out if they're like, you know, I, I would like a different color palette. I see more like colorful, fun iOS lock screens, you know, since Apple made that change. I don't believe I've seen anyone outside of the, my, my fellow, like, you know, phone sickos tinting the icons on their home screens, like, normies are not doing that, I don't think.
25:35 David Pierce? Phone sickos is, is the exact correct description of who does that.
25:38 Speaker 02 Yes, and I put myself in that category, lovingly with all of my fellow phone sickos.
25:43 David Pierce? Yeah. With all of these personalizations, my problem is like, and it's like what you said with the material you colors, like, 60% of it, I'm like, this looks awesome. I love it. It's so cool. And then like four times a day, you open a screen and it just like, it just feels and looks awful and everything is bad. And I'm like, I'm just going to go back to the way that it was. And so I think like, my hope is, If these companies, and Google in particular, can stay committed to this idea, that it'll actually get developers and users and like wallpaper makers and everybody to buy into this way of thinking about what a phone should look like, and start to solve some of those edge cases. Because right now, it's like, half the icons on my screen look great in whatever color I've chosen, and the other half look like butts.
26:27 David Pierce? And you're like, you gotta fix that.
26:29 Speaker 02 Right. Fix the butts, please.
26:30 David Pierce? Fix the butts, and then Android will be perfect, is my takeaway.
26:34 Speaker 02 Exactly.
26:35 David Pierce? So Android 16, coming this year, seems like it might be the most interesting Android in a minute. Like, it's been a while since we had an Android that you sort of update your phone and look at it and go, oh, it's different now. This feels like it might do it, and I'm excited about that.
26:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, me too. And there's other stuff. They've got kind of like a live activities thing. There's gonna be new haptics and all that. It's gonna look and feel and do different things. So, yeah, it's been a minute. I'm excited for that.
27:05 David Pierce? Me too. All right, well, we gotta take a break, and then we're gonna come back. We're gonna talk about Snapchat. Allison, thank you as always.
27:10 Speaker 02 Thank you.
27:11 David Pierce? All right. I made a mistake. I hung up on Allison before we did one thing that Allison asked. So Allison's back. Hi, Allison.
27:16 Speaker 02 I'm back.
27:18 David Pierce? You had a special request for the people.
27:20 Speaker 02 I do.
27:21 David Pierce? What's up?
27:22 Speaker 02 I have the great honor of hosting a couple of episodes of The Vergecast this summer. And something I wanna do is ask all of you to let me know your phone-buying conundrums. I wanna hear from people who are considering a new phone, who are stuck between two phones, who don't wanna upgrade their iPhone Mini. I see you. I am one of you. This can be a pep talk. This can be therapy. I can help you talk through a buying decision. I spend all day thinking about what phone people should buy. So this is like, I'm just like itching to provide this service.
28:05 Speaker 02 So send me your questions, your troubles. I would like to hear them.
28:11 David Pierce? I love this. I'm gonna call and ask you if it's actually time for me to give up on the iPhone and switch to Android, if I should go through the pain of leaving iMessage once and for all. That's mine.
28:21 Speaker 02 Okay, that'll be a 60-minute segment.
28:26 David Pierce? Cool. And so, yeah, same way as always. Call the hotline 866-VERGE11. Email [email protected] . Yeah, you and a bunch of folks are gonna have a lot of fun on this show over the summer, and I am very excited.
28:37 Speaker 02 It's gonna rule. I'm so excited.
28:40 David Pierce? Sweet. All right, now we're gonna take a break for real. Allison, thanks again.
28:43 Speaker 02 Thank you.
28:44 David Pierce? We'll be right back.
28:50 Speaker 03 This episode is brought to you by Subaru. You know that place your mind always wanders to? The lake, the mountains, the homes of the people you love most? The completely redesigned 2026 Subaru Outback is built to help you get there. With legendary capabilities, standard symmetrical all wheel drive, and the confidence to go further. The 2026 Subaru Outback. Love never looked so good. Visit subaru.com/ Outback to learn more.
29:18 David Pierce? All right, we're back. Alex Heath is here. Hi, Alex.
29:21 Speaker 04 Hey, David.
29:22 David Pierce? So, as we do from time to time, you and I need to talk about Snapchat. It's possible that you and I are the only people in the news business who care about Snapchat, which is, I think, part of the point. But I care deeply about Snapchat, and I want to talk about it. So, I think we should probably start like last fall. Because Snapchat launches this big, or announces that they're doing this big redesign, kind of a whole new way of thinking about Snapchat. I think they called it Simple Snapchat. And you, you like understood what was going on at the time, and I think we talked about it a little bit. But refresh our memory a little bit. Like, what was Snapchat trying to do with this big change last fall?
30:00 Speaker 04 Yeah, Snapchat started as a pretty simple disappearing messaging app. And over the years, they added on a lot of stuff. There's a map where you can see where your friends are in the app. There's Memories, which is essentially their own camera roll experience. There's Discover, which was their really early take on how a publishing environment can work in a visual messaging application. And then they were doing Spotlight, which was their TikTok video, you know, full screen swipe up and down competitor. And it was just a lot.
30:34 David Pierce? That is a lot of stuff.
30:36 Speaker 04 They're also scaling beyond their core demographic of young people. And I think older people don't want a ton of tabs. And so the idea was let's condense all of this. They really need their content business, the video business, Spotlight and Discover, to get bigger and be more culturally relevant. And the idea was let's just simplify everything to three tabs. Messaging, the camera, Snap always opens to the camera. And then on the right, you would have all of the video content and publisher content merged together into just one feed, like Reels or TikTok. And this was, you know, meant to not only appease investors by making the video business
31:17 Speaker 04 more front and center, but hopefully make the app more intuitive and encourage more people to not just message their friends on Snap, but watch video, watch stuff from creators, watch stuff from publishers.
31:31 David Pierce? The theory of that, still, even as you describe it, strikes me as a good idea. That I think like Snap's whole thing has been trying to do all of this in one place makes sense, right? And I think you can sort of litigate that forever if the messaging app and the content business should have been fully separate products. But Snap has believed that they should be at least next to each other for a very long time. And the idea of like camera in the middle, talk to your friends on one side, public facing video feed on the other side, like that, that makes sense to me. That is like, that is the Snapchat that seems like it could work. And yet, and yet they, in an earnings report just recently, they just bailed on that whole entire idea.
32:15 David Pierce? What is happening here?
32:17 Speaker 04 I think Snap is really struggling to execute, especially over the last, I would say, five years, really. There was a moment where it seemed like they were inventing all these new formats, really looking ahead to where social media was going. Everyone was copying them. And lately, it's just been a lot of executional.
32:38 Speaker 04 Business strategy mishaps. And what happened with this simple Snapchat rollout was that it was really hurting engagement with the audience that consumes content the most, which was the opposite of what they wanted to happen. And because Snap is so already financially on the rocks, they can't take huge swings like they used to. Like when they redesigned the app right after they IPO'd and then Kylie Jenner posted about how it sucked and the stock tanked and all of that, right?
33:09 David Pierce? You can't really afford another one of those.
33:11 Speaker 04 Yeah, they stuck with it at the time and now they're just so beholden to Wall Street and quarterly earnings and proving that they can actually be a real business, that they can't afford to tank their business with a redesign like this, even if they think it's the thing that's going to work in the long run. So yeah, it was a big swing and a miss.
33:29 David Pierce? Yeah, and it does feel like that tension you described might be just unsolvable at some point for Snapchat. Cause it is, the two things that keep happening are, like especially for young users, they're growing up and continuing to use Snapchat. And there is like, there is a world in which Snapchat is more and more sort of culturally important to vast numbers of people than ever. Like it is, it is a communication tool that like several generations of people now use all day, every day. And that is very important and very powerful. And yet Snapchat cannot figure out how to make a single nickel off of that entire thing.
34:08 David Pierce? And so it just seems like it's, it's now stuck in this business of trying to be TikTok or Reels when TikTok and Reels exist.
34:19 Speaker 04 Well, let's give them a little credit. They make more than a nickel.
34:24 Speaker 04 How much revenue do you think they made last quarter?
34:27 David Pierce? Oh, that's an interesting question.
34:29 Speaker 04 I want to ask you that and then how many users do you think they have? I think the audience will be surprised by both of these.
34:37 David Pierce? I'm going to guess there's more users than revenue.
34:40 Speaker 04 Actually, no, but they're close.
34:43 David Pierce? I think I'm, give me the numbers. I'm gonna bet it's, I'm gonna bet it's less than I would have thought.
34:47 Speaker 04 Annually, yes, but quarterly, so they're, they're doing about 1.3 billion a year in rev, or in a quarter in revenue.
34:54 David Pierce? That's higher than I would have guessed. I was gonna guess like high hundred millions.
34:56 Speaker 04 Yeah, and they've surpassed 900 million monthly active users. So they are rapidly approaching a billion users. Over 460 million of those are daily.
35:06 David Pierce? That's huge. Like that, that, those are giant numbers.
35:09 Speaker 04 Significantly larger than X. It's in the same ballpark as like Telegram, maybe bigger. Um, obviously Meta's platforms are, are larger. Um, but in terms of like independent social media, it's by far the biggest.
35:23 David Pierce? Yeah.
35:24 Speaker 04 And at the same time, uh, Snap's stock price, if you pull it up from when they went public, God, what is it like 10ish years ago now, is, is negative. Uh, so this is a business that has gone sideways over the last decade, while at the same time scaling its user base by a dramatic, uh, you know, percentage. And I think that just goes to show that maybe the thesis of this conversation too, that maybe you can't make money off of messaging. I don't know.
35:55 David Pierce? Well, yeah, I mean, I guess, i- is it, would you chalk that up to, like you said, sort of pure executional failure? Like, is this just a function of not having a very good sales team? Or like, or is there something kind of fundamentally different about what Snapchat is and who it's reaching? That just doesn't work the same way that it has for other companies?
36:17 Speaker 04 I think it's a mix of all of that. I think it's really hard to compete with a platform like Meta that has over 10 million advertisers, platforms with billions of users, and it's just been grinding on the ad stuff and now AI, uh, which is increasingly getting intertwined with ads for much longer at a much larger run rate. And, you know, I think Snap also has been kind of precious about things for far too long. It is now finally realizing it needs to be a real business. And I think that delay in getting there. Really cost them. Um, and you know, Snap, I, I've been covering Snap since before they went
36:57 Speaker 04 public, um, when they were a very small startup, the headlines like is Snapchat dead, is Snapchat cooked, you know, Snapchat's almost dead have been written many times. I've written them many times. The company has still held on, but it's definitely not what everyone hoped it would be. And, you know, they've tried ways to monetize, uh, they've got Snapchat plus now, which is a subscription that has 15 million subscribers where you get a bunch of extra things in the app. Um, their ads business is meaningful. It's nowhere near Meta or Googles, but it's, it's meaningful. It's nothing to completely, uh, thumb up, but they're just still really
37:39 Speaker 04 struggling to figure out how to monetize the app effectively. And for the longest time, they just weren't monetizing the main way people use the app, which is messaging. And recently they started putting ads in chat and they're testing that, but they don't want to tank the metrics of messaging either because that's their core business. So there's just a lot of, they're, they're trying to do a lot, uh, because messaging and all of that that it entails and really talking to friends is just really hard to put ads in.
38:10 David Pierce? Yeah. Well, and then next to all of that is, is this thing that Snap has been trying to sell itself as for years now, which is that Snap is a camera company, right? That, that actually we're not about messaging. We're not about spotlight. We're not about any of this other stuff. We're about camera. And I think I bought that for a long time. And I think still to this day, like if you want to talk about who is doing the most interesting AR camera stuff, I think it's probably still Snap. The problem is just no one cares. And I think, I think either we're still too early and this is happening more slowly than we realized. Uh, and I mean, the, the first generation of spectacles was 10 years ago and like Snap has just been at
38:51 David Pierce? this a long time and the, the world has not caught up to Snap and either it's going to happen slower than anybody bet on, or it's just not going to happen at all. And I I used to think with confidence that it was just that it was happening slower. And I'm starting to wonder more and more if it's just not going to happen at all.
39:09 Speaker 04 You know, they don't call themselves a camera company anymore.
39:11 David Pierce? Did that change?
39:12 Speaker 04 They dropped it. Yeah, they dropped it around the time they were redesigning the app and trying to really become an ads business. Now they're just a regular old tech company.
39:21 David Pierce? They're just Snapchat again?
39:22 Speaker 04 Yeah.
39:23 David Pierce? That feels very telling to me.
39:24 Speaker 04 Well, I mean, they they they still open to the camera and spectacles is still very much to the chagrin of their investors. A serious bet that Evan Spiegel, the CEO, is very focused on. But yeah, they're they're playing in a land of giants there, right? And gosh, you think back to like the yellow vending machines, the first spectacles drop, how buzzy that was.
39:50 Speaker 04 And it kind of is snap in a nutshell. They created a lot of buzz. They did something pretty early. That was foreshadowing what was to come, right now with the Meta Ray-Bans camera glasses finally taking off 10 years later. But at the same time, they wildly overshot the demand and ended up costing them like 40 million in unsold inventory. Because they bought way more spectacles, thinking this thing was going to scale way faster. And then it didn't. And then they've like reset that division like 14 times since then. So it's just this repeat pattern of good ideas that are probably too early. And then messing up on the execution. I don't know how else to say it.
40:33 David Pierce? Yeah.
40:33 Speaker 04 And when you look at how messaging apps are monetized, Meta is probably the best example. They actually monetize it through ads on their other apps. So Meta has this conglomerate where ads that point people to message with businesses and WhatsApp and Messenger is a 10 billion a year business. And those ads don't show up in WhatsApp or Messenger. They show up on Facebook and Instagram and they point people to those apps. So Meta has built this flywheel with these products that serve different purposes that point to each other. And that's how they're monetizing messaging.
41:10 Speaker 04 And then the only other really meaningful way that someone has monetized messaging besides that would be like a Discord or a Telegram, which is they're smaller, still pretty subscription based. Most of the revenue Telegram made last year was actually from crypto, from its crypto holdings. It has this weird cryptocurrency that you can use in the app.
41:31 David Pierce? Sounds right.
41:33 Speaker 04 So no one has figured out ads in a messaging environment.
41:36 David Pierce? Yeah.
41:36 Speaker 04 And for years, up until the last couple of years, when they started testing ads in chat on Snapchat, all the people at Snap I would talk to would be like, we are never going to really crack revenue growth until we figure out how to monetize that messaging tab. And they're trying now, but you know, we'll see. I think rolling back the Discover, the content piece back to where it was, is a sign that that video business and the ads that could go in there, which make a lot of money for Instagram and TikTok, are also gonna be a slower roll for Snap. So.
42:09 David Pierce? Yeah.
42:09 Speaker 04 It's just a challenging time for them.
42:11 David Pierce? Yeah, well, and I think you you bring up a broader point about sort of consumer messaging apps that I've been thinking about a lot, because it keeps coming up in this meta trial too, where on the one hand, you know, there's all these conversations about Instagram and whether Meta helped or hindered Instagram. And then on the WhatsApp side, it's just like, it was just this tiny lifestyle business that had no interest in making money and no plans to make money and was never gonna make any money. And then Meta bought it and like supercharged it as a business, but but like not really. And for a long time, Meta didn't make any money and they spent a ton of money on WhatsApp. And now they're just starting to, like you said, sort of turn the screws on how to make money off of this giant platform that you have. And it's just made me wonder like.
42:52 David Pierce? We are at a moment right now where I think you could argue that messaging, like person-to-person messaging, group chats and texts and whatever is like the single most important thing we do in our online lives right now. It is how we communicate in so many ways. And it just isn't a business for anybody. Like, as far as I can tell, no one has figured out how to directly monetize letting you and I talk to each other on the internet. No one. You either have to subsidize it by making me buy an iPhone and making it really hard for me to leave. You have to find some, like you said, sort of ancillary way to, like, you sell ads where you put your number that I can text you,
43:36 David Pierce? which is not the same. But so I'm like, I've reached a point now where it's like, is this, is there just not a business in chat? And if that's true, is that a problem? And it feels like downstream from this, that feels like it might be, because then you look at somebody like Snap, who is like, oh, what we have to do is you have to actually just ruin the experience for you in order to make any money off of this.
43:59 Speaker 04 I think it's a problem for people who can't build something around it, like Snap right now. You're right, like, Apple doesn't make money off iMessage, but iMessage helps them sell iPhones. And Google, with its many, many messaging apps, I'm sure makes money indirectly from those messaging apps.
44:16 David Pierce? I don't know.
44:17 Speaker 04 Maybe, who knows? They probably don't even know. But yeah, it's, I mean, do you remember when Snap was doing mini-games and a little mini-app store? And they were trying to do WeChat and have all these apps? And they bought like gaming studios.
44:31 David Pierce? That's right.
44:33 Speaker 04 Yeah, you could, and you could transact through these mini-apps.
44:36 David Pierce? And all that was gonna be stuff you could like invoke inside the chat, right?
44:39 Speaker 04 Yeah, and they shut that down too. And so they've tried. I mean, they've tried a lot of things. I think for them, they have to get the content piece down. They have, I mean, they have creators that are huge on Snap. You know, David Dobrik, people like that, that have millions of followers, make a lot of money. But it's just not culturally relevant, like TikTok or even Reels. And that's a problem for them. Maybe they don't see it that way, but I think it is. And they also have this relationship with publishers where they share ad revenue with a bunch of publishers. Vox Media was in this at one point. I'm not sure if we still are. And That also just feels like that entire chessboard of publishers' relationships with
45:24 Speaker 04 platforms is fraught. So I think the real Hail Mary bet is that Spectacles will work eventually. Snap will be able to transition to what Spiegel, and to his credit, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai all also agree is maybe the next platform, AR glasses. It is the bet, for sure. Yeah, and that that will be the thing that gives them their next 10 to 20 years. Now, I've written about this. I'm very skeptical of their ability to compete. I would love to see a smaller player, especially one like Snap that's been pretty innovative with the products it does, stay in the space and challenge the giants.
46:05 Speaker 04 But with their financial profile right now, it's such a capital-intensive business to do hardware well at scale, it's very hard. It's a very hard uphill thing. And like their last Spectacles that I tried last year, you know, they're not even for sale. They're just letting developers try them. And, you know, I think they'll do a consumer version in maybe the next year or two, but, you know, it's going to cost a lot. They're not going to be able to make a ton of them. It'll still be an early adopter thing. Meanwhile, their investors don't really have patience for them to not be growing their ads business the way they are. So they're still not profitable either, you know, Snap's not made an annual profit ever. So that's, if they could really like change the way
46:49 Speaker 04 the company runs and be leaner and make money and be content with being a smaller business, even though they have a huge user base that's highly engaged, you know, maybe they'll be able to hang in there. They also, I mean, they have the benefit, I guess, you could call it a benefit or a curse of their founder-controlled, you know, like Meta, like Evan Spiegel can't be fired. He controls the company with Bobby Murphy, the co-founder. And that's why stuff like Spectacles exists. So yeah, that's a complicated, fascinating company. You know, when I'm out and about, I still see Snap open on phones, you know, like on an airplane. I'll still see people using it. It's still very much like in the culture, especially like among college students. A thing I've heard is that
47:32 Speaker 04 As the pressure on how kids and teens use these platforms and the a specific, you know, attacks on Snap, the anonymity of it, the ephemerality, which leads to things like drug dealing and like sex extortion and like there's just inherent things in the product that can be really bad, especially for young people with the way it's designed. They're starting to feel that a little bit in terms of not only just the regulatory scrutiny, but like the way that people and parents especially think about the product. And I think that could be a huge potential problem for their continued growth, especially with young people. They've got a lot to navigate and they've
48:12 Speaker 04 got Meta and all these other companies also betting and spending way more money on this new hardware platform that they're trying to invent.
48:21 David Pierce? Yeah, I mean, it seems like even on the messaging side, I mean, I give Snap a lot of credit. I think it has been the most innovative messaging app for a very long time. And in terms of like, how people talk to each other, it is always been the most interesting one, right? Everything else is either stealing features from Snapchat or just less interesting, right? Like, we have a million text messaging platforms and nothing else that is even trying to do the thing that Snapchat does really well. But I think you're right. It is such a double edged sword. This idea that everything goes away is both very sort of compelling in a way right now in that like what we're learning is that more things should go away on the internet. But also, it comes with huge downsides. And
49:01 David Pierce? I think we are reckoning with that in new ways. What is your sense of how big and maybe how desperate a swing ads in chat is?
49:12 Speaker 04 I think it's big. They haven't fully rolled it out to my knowledge, but they are starting to put ads in chat. They just have to. It's just where people spend the most time in the app. It always has been. And like I said, it is always driven certain people in the company crazy that they're not able to monetize that engagement.
49:31 David Pierce? Right.
49:31 Speaker 04 And that's why they did stuff like Discover and Spotlight and all these other things. And AR is like, maybe we can find a way to monetize through that. So they have to do it, I think.
49:42 Speaker 04 They they they don't want to tank engagement, though, at the same time, like they found that they did with the redesign last year that they're rolling back.
49:50 David Pierce? It is an interesting test. I mean, you think about, uh, we talk a lot about how sticky messaging is, and it's one of those things, like, if you can, if you can build this sort of network of people talking to each other, people will stay on like almost anything else. But I also feel like the minute you put a pre-roll ad on me opening my group chat, I'm out, right? Like, that's, that's, there are very few things that are gonna unstick you like that. And so I think I'm, again, Snapchat is a, an app that has really interesting and in many ways ahead of its time design ideas. And so I think this question of like, what are what are ads supposed to look like in chat? I just don't know, because I'm like a banner ad in between every four messages. Again, I'm out. Like, I just, I don't know. I don't even know how to imagine
50:36 David Pierce? what a successful version of this looks like. But I also understand why at some point Snap and everybody else is gonna have to figure out what it looks like.
50:44 Speaker 04 Yeah, I I think they have to. You know, this conversation has me reminiscing about, you know, 10 years ago, like, using Snap with uh, my wife, who's my girlfriend at the time, and like, how we would just like share things throughout the day with each other in a way that was very like fluid and like goofy and like just a simple photo of something or like,
51:02 David Pierce? Yeah.
51:02 Speaker 04 You felt more connected to people through that visual messaging thing. And there's no product that really has captured that since then.
51:09 David Pierce? No, nothing.
51:10 Speaker 04 And network effects are real. And when you, you know, this happens, I bet a lot of people listening to this can relate. You get older, you leave college, you, and people are using iMessage instead, or they're using WhatsApp, or like Signal, or, and your networks fracture. And Snap is just not a place where I have my friends anymore. And I kind of miss that. Like, I miss, I miss those early days of it where. You felt like you could be yourself and you could share just more frequently because it felt casual and depressurized in a way that Instagram definitely does not, or you know, some of these other services. And yeah, them putting ads in that experience feels just like it inherently screws it up.
51:52 Speaker 04 So it's gonna be a tricky balance for them.
51:56 David Pierce? It's it's a tough one. In the way that like, I think one of the reasons you do something like Discover is that actually it's really obvious how to do the ads there.
52:05 Speaker 04 Right.
52:05 David Pierce? It's like, that's a thing we know how to do it. It works and people are used to it and it's you can understand why all of that works and even ads in stories and stuff like that, like that stuff feels natural in a way that there just is no version of that in in human to human chat that I think is ever gonna feel good to people. To your point about the the growing the user base outside of kind of the core Snapchat people. What's your sense of how much they even care about that anymore? I mean, like you said, the user base is enormous. I I'm I don't know a single person my age who uses Snapchat, but maybe it doesn't matter. Like, maybe I'm old and lame now.
52:42 Speaker 04 Uh, no, it matters. It matters. If you're running an ads business, it matters because teenagers can't buy a lot of stuff. So.
52:49 David Pierce? Fair, which has always been a Snapchat problem.
52:51 Speaker 04 Yeah, you really need people in their 30s and 40s, 50s even. Where a lot of the growth is happening is outside of the US and even Europe. Their users actually slightly declined in North America last quarter, which is a bad sign.
53:08 Speaker 04 You really have to be strong and growing in North America as one of these social networks that's ad-supported for investors to believe in you, for your stock price to continue to grow. Which, the reason I focus on that is like the stock price is a trickle down of a lot of things that lets you hire better people. It gives you stability to make a more strategic, long-term decisions that cost you in the short term, what we just talked about with the redesign. So it matters and I think they're struggling to break out of that college teen market. And they always have, but.
53:43 Speaker 04 Yeah, I mean, maybe the ship has sailed, you know, I've been, you cover social media long enough, you just realize like network effects are all that matters. Once something tips in one direction, it's really hard, if not impossible, to tip it the other way. And once all of your friends have decided that they use other apps to talk to you, how do you get them back on Snap? If I had to guess, there's millions and millions of people just in the US that they would love to, you know, quote unquote resurrect, like bring back to the app.
54:13 David Pierce? Yeah.
54:14 Speaker 04 Um, and how do you do that? Like, what is the, it used to be like viral AR filters, you know, that would turn you into a baby or something like that, right? And now it's like, that's ChatGPT. It's like people doing that with AI. And it's like Snap did that eight years ago. And it, and it gave them these super viral moments where people came to the app and they just haven't had moments like that anymore. And so the thing that I watch with Snap is like, is the product innovation still there? Are they still shipping things regularly that kind of wow the industry? And that pace has definitely slowed as they're trying to fix the business. And so, you know, the thing that may hurt them is like focusing too much on the business they have to save in spite of the product that they have to keep relevant.
54:57 David Pierce? Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's kind of a vicious cycle at some point, right? You can't take the big swings without the money to take the big swings, but without big swings, you don't get the money to take the big swings.
55:07 Speaker 04 Yeah, we should give them credit for the scale they've hit. It's, it's still as next to impossible. You know, I remember I was in DC when Zuckerberg was on the stand for the Meta FTC trial and he was talking about how, to his knowledge, no independent company has hit a billion users. They all either get bought by a bigger conglomerate, um, or, you know, taken out. And Snap is about to hit a billion users.
55:30 David Pierce? Yeah.
55:30 Speaker 04 And that's a very hard thing to do.
55:32 David Pierce? I mean, that, that's why I'm so interested in this company, right? Like, I cannot stop rooting for Snapchat, like sort of against all reality and evidence. I think Snapchat is doing a lot of smart, good, correct things. And it's just like, the, the fact that it just, if it could solve the ad business, that would open up everything else it wants to do, is such a frustrating reality to me that it is like, what, what this company is not short of is good product that people like, right? Like it is, it is actually over and over able to make good products that people like. It just can't make enough money for any of that to matter. I mean, and I even think about like, The Pixie drone was cool and interesting and exciting and there just wasn't.
56:17 David Pierce? That's not the kind of thing you can do when you don't have an ad business, right? It's the kind of thing you can do when you're Mark Zuckerberg and you have just a money fountain coming out of Facebook all the time. Snap just can't, literally can't afford to do that. And it's so frustrating because there is such good product in that company and there always has been. And it's just like the reality of being a company in the world has prevented Snapchat from I think being what it actually could have been.
56:42 Speaker 04 Man, RIP Pixie, that one lasted less than a year, I think.
56:45 David Pierce? I know. One of the cooler videos you've made, I think, going through like a warehouse, like an arcade looking thing.
56:51 Speaker 04 That was a fun one. Yeah, there's so many things in the last few years that Snap has announced and then killed within a year. They were gonna do this huge shopping play where they were gonna literally put like big vending machines with AR displays on them in stores. I remember doing this at their event a couple of years ago and it was gonna like let their ads be more targeted, they were gonna hook into all these retailers and do AR try on stuff and like reduce the amount of trade ins that stores need to do with physical goods, like you could just wear the stuff on you. Really cool, innovative, kind of weird, wacky idea, killed it within a year because they had to focus on getting the business turned around.
57:27 David Pierce? Right.
57:28 Speaker 04 And that back and forth that we've been talking about where they try a thing and then they realize they can't do it either because it doesn't work or it's hurting the business, they gotta focus on the business, has just been a pattern for the last like five years. And for them to really come through this, they've gotta get out of that cycle and I'm not sure how they do.
57:48 David Pierce? Should Evan have just taken the six billion from Mark Zuckerberg all those years ago?
57:52 Speaker 04 I don't know, I mean, if it was mostly Facebook stock, which I think a good, healthy chunk of it was, uh, yeah, everyone at Snap would be a lot richer, right?
58:01 David Pierce? Yeah, that's true. Yeah, I mean, 10 years ago, everyone should have taken the deal if it included Facebook stuff.
58:07 Speaker 04 Snap has had so many offers, you know, Google many times, Facebook again before they went public, other companies in other parts of the world. It's a very valuable asset. Like I said, there's very few scaled social networks to get to a billion users that have this kind of engagement. It's just can this team that's running it make it a huge business? And so far, the answer is no.
58:32 David Pierce? Right. It does make you wonder, I mean, again, back to the like, can you make a messaging business a business? You wonder at some point if this is just a like structural mismatch. If like the thing that is great about Snapchat is never going to be its business. And that is a really hard problem to solve because it then means you have to go do another thing really well.
58:53 Speaker 04 Yeah.
58:53 David Pierce? And very few companies have actually successfully done that.
58:57 Speaker 04 Yeah, we'll see. I mean, Spectacles is the bet. That's like the big bet outside of Snapchat. It's going to take a long time. And I feel like I was saying that 10 years ago. So this has been like the story of AR glasses is like, it's going to be big in three more years. And then you keep saying that over and over.
59:13 David Pierce? Yep. We were talking about robot taxis and AR glasses right about the same time.
59:17 Speaker 04 But look, like robot taxis is a good example. And I think you and I have used this analogy before, like, all of a sudden, we're taking Waymos and like, not even thinking about it, right? Like, some of the times this stuff does actually just arrive. I do think AR glasses will arrive. They keep getting pushed out farther than all these companies want. But if that timeline shrinks, maybe with the help of AI, maybe that helps Snap get through this. We'll see. So far, Evan has shown that he is not willing to give up on that.
59:47 David Pierce? All right, we got to take one more break, and then we're going to come back and do a question from the Verge hotline. Be right back.
1:00:26 David Pierce? All right, we're back. Let's do a question from the Vergecast hotline. As always, you can call 866 VERGE11. You can email [email protected] . Send us all of your thoughts and feelings and questions about everything. Recently, it seems a lot of you have questions about places you've found ants, which I find extremely delightful. But also, you continue to have questions about the Google trial and Chrome in particular. For now, let me just play you one of the questions I've actually gotten a few versions of over the last couple of weeks and see if I can answer it. Here it is.
1:00:56 Speaker 05 Hey, David. My name is Chirag and I had a thought about the court ruling and the ongoing remedies trial for Google and Google Chrome and the talk about splitting it off into or like having it sold to a separate company. But I haven't seen in any of the discussions so far, folks considering that why won't Google just turn down the project altogether? Why do they have to consider selling it? Like, sure, they could make some billions of dollars by selling it, but they probably stand to lose more, especially if they're selling it to OpenAI. The value gain that OpenAI can have over the long term and like the immediate market
1:01:38 Speaker 05 share that they would have, the whatever browser market share that Chrome has. It seems like unless this number is extremely high, which I'm sure the DOJ will not let it be, then why Google should even consider selling it and instead just be like, well, Chromium can go open source, we will not contribute to it anymore. And Chrome as a project, we just turn it down and will, you know, consider some open source project as like the default browser in Android going forward. Yeah, I'm just curious about your thoughts and why do you think that this is a bad idea or a good idea? And if Google should or Google will actually consider doing this? Thank you.
1:02:18 David Pierce? Okay, so I think the thing about this question is it speaks to all of what's happening in this trial in a way that I actually find really fascinating. I asked a bunch of people this question, like, isn't the better idea if you want to take away Google's dominance to just shut Chrome down altogether, right? Just remove the project, open source it, something, right? Like, just take it away from Google. It doesn't matter who gets it. You don't even necessarily want to sort of king make some other company. Just make Google get rid of something. Push the project away, make it nobody's. I think what I've come to realize is that's actually not the goal from the DOJ in this case. So if you look at it, there are sort of two things going on, right? What they want to do is they want to undo some of Google's dominance.
1:03:03 David Pierce? You have this company that has built this whole system by which it remains the biggest and most important thing in search, has all the market share, and you want to sort of systematically stop that from happening, right? But the way that the DOJ frames it, it's not just enough to sort of level the playing field starting now. If you say, okay, beginning today, May of 2025, or whenever this trial actually ends, we are all playing by the same rules. Google has this gigantic, essentially insurmountable lead, and even if you take away Chrome, all you're doing is taking Google's lead and moving it around, right?
1:03:43 David Pierce? Like, what the DOJ wants is to engineer a fairer fight, and that means not just slowing Google down, but actually speeding others up. And this is one of the things about this trial that I have found really complicated. So if you take something like Chrome and you say, okay, what we need is we want to give this to somebody in order to make them a viable competitor. This is what Google is facing with a lot of its search stuff, by the way. The DOJ's big plan to essentially white label Google Search and force Google to give away all of the data and all of the search results and all of the query information that it gets from its search engine in order to let others make better search engines, it's the same idea here, right? It's not just you can't do X, Y, and Z anymore.
1:04:28 David Pierce? It's you at Google have to do the work to bring a competitor or several competitors or hundreds of competitors up to your level. That's what the DOJ wants. And when it comes to Chrome... You have this thing that could just be put into an open source world and everybody could maintain it. But I have to say, Google's argument has been that actually building a browser is hugely expensive and hugely complicated. And Chrome is only as good as it is because Google has been the only company willing to invest this much time and this many resources into it. I find that very compelling, and I think the judge does too. And so the idea that you would just release it to everybody and Chrome would continue to be great, I think is just wrong.
1:05:10 David Pierce? And so you end up in a position where you're saying, okay, we're either going to kill Chrome entirely for everybody, which I don't think is actually plausible or even maybe possible, given what Chrome is and where it is, you'd essentially just like blow up half of people's devices. Nobody, I think, wants that. So then you have to say, we have to put this in someone's hands who also has the resources and incentives and finances to take care of this. There aren't that many companies that can do that. There are a bunch of companies out there that would very much like to buy Chrome. Perplexity has said it wants it. Yahoo said it wants it. OpenAI said it wants it. I mean, anybody with the resources would happily buy Chrome. It's one of the most popular and important things on the internet.
1:05:54 David Pierce? I've heard from a lot of companies who are like, you don't understand, having this kind of browser data is hugely important to almost any business on the internet. If I know what four billion people are doing online, I can figure out how to make money off of that. It's just that it's going to be really expensive to buy Chrome. So there aren't that many companies that can actually afford the thing. And doing that is going to be challenging. So the flip side, though, is that whoever does get it immediately becomes enormously powerful, right? It's like if you just let someone buy Instagram. Hugely powerful because now you own Instagram. It's not, it's not like you're bringing somebody up. You've given somebody the most powerful version of this product on the market.
1:06:36 David Pierce? And so far, it seems like the company that makes the most sense would be OpenAI. It has the resources. It has the ability to raise infinite money in order to be able to do stuff like this. It has a real incentive to have a browser, to have all this data, to be able to put ChatGPT more directly in front of you all the time. It is the one closest to the same set of incentives and resources that Google has. But then, if you give OpenAI Chrome, or even let OpenAI buy Chrome, I think all the money is sort of immaterial, it's just money. Now, OpenAI is vastly powerful and is in a position of huge authority over a lot of what we do online, too. And the question, I think, in front of the judge in this case is,
1:07:19 David Pierce? is it better to have two sort of giant superpowers of the web than one? And the problem is that we've had one, and it's been Google. But does two solve the problem? Is Google and AI enough competition that it's okay that we have two companies that are, you know, a thousand miles ahead of everybody else in the race? Or is the goal to have dozens, hundreds, thousands of other companies that can do the kind of stuff that these companies are doing too? And if that's the goal, I don't think you can allow Google to sell Chrome to OpenAI. I don't even know who you have to allow Google to sell Chrome to, if what you're trying to do is raise a whole industry.
1:08:01 David Pierce? Chromium, the open source browser stack underneath a lot of this is very important and is one of the things that lets a lot of people roll other browsers. But Chrome won, like in every meaningful way, Chrome won the browser wars. And everybody else is just kind of nibbling around the edges. So the question in front of the court in this particular case is, do we want to king make one other company in order to make them as powerful as Google, or at least close to it, in the way that the internet works? And is that competition? Like, does that count? Did we do the job? Or is there some other remedy that we're gonna have to figure out here? And I think that's why the DOJ is pursuing this idea of both kind of making Google white label all of its search stuff,
1:08:45 David Pierce? such that any other search engine can get it, but also take away Chrome and give it to somebody else. And so I think where we might land is, instead of one giant, we have two, whether it's OpenAI or somebody else. And then the hope is, if you can also have dozens or hundreds or whatever of other Google-quality search engines, that that market becomes the solvable thing.
1:09:08 David Pierce? I don't know if that's the right answer, but I do think that's why Google isn't going to be allowed to just get rid of Chrome. There are a bunch of business reasons Google wouldn't do it, right? Like, it makes a certain kind of like logical sense to say, Google would rather just shut the whole thing down. But if you offer the company the chance to have, you know, tens of billions of dollars or nothing, they're pretty much always going to choose the tens of billions of dollars. And Google wants Chrome. Google wants this thing to continue to work. So it is going to hold on to it for dear life. And I think the idea that it would just sort of voluntarily shut it down. It makes a certain kind of abstract sense, but I don't think it's realistic for Google. And it's also not what the DOJ wants because if it goes away, all it does is make Google
1:09:54 David Pierce? the same kind of powerful, but in sort of a different direction. I hope that makes sense. I think it's a really interesting question and there's a lot of this left to litigate. There's a lot of decisions for Judge Meta left to make about what competition looks like and what it means to bring Google down versus bring others up and what sort of middle point there counts as success. There's a bunch left of this trial. We have closing arguments. We have the decision. We're months away. There's going to be appeals. It's going to be a while before we start this out, but I think we're, we're starting to see what it might look like. And I find it totally fascinating.
1:10:30 David Pierce? All right. That is it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to everybody who came on the show and thank you as always for listening. Like I mentioned, if you have thoughts or feelings or questions or anything else you want to know, you can always email [email protected] , call the hotline 866 verge11. We're going to have a bunch of guest hosts here all summer doing really fun hotline stuff in addition to everything else. So get all your questions in now because they are already off and running, doing really fun stuff. This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Will Poor and Brandon Kiefer. The Vergecast is a Verge production, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neil, I and I will be back on Friday to talk about all of the stuff going on at Microsoft Build, all of the stuff going on at Google I/O, all the stuff going on in AI and everything else. See you then. Rock and roll.
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