How To Use Facebook’s New Snapchat Clone ‘Flash’ On Any Android Phone
It is no secret that Facebook is facing tough competition from its rival, Snapchat. To kill it’s competitor, the social networking giant has released a Snapchat-clone app called Flash made for emerging markets where Wi-Fi is scarce and cellular network is spotty.
Flash is a standalone ephemeral picture and video messaging app complete with face-distorting masks that looks almost identical to Snapchat. Facebook boasts that Flash is “less than 25 MB” in size, as opposed to Snapchat which is roughly 76MB. The app is only available in Brazil at the moment. Flash has a camera first home screen, a chat window, and stories, all extremely similar to the corresponding features on Snapchat.
Although Flash is only officially available in Brazil, you can try it right now on any Android device in any country. All you need to do is go to your device settings, click on “Security” and then turn on “Unknown sources” in order to download and install the APK.
Once you enable Unknown Sources, you can download the APK on your mobile device with this link.
Once done, login with your Facebook account user id to try it out. For those who are familiar with Snapchat, it is very easy to navigate, as there’s a chat screen on the left, a “Your Story” screen on the right, and a camera interface in the middle.
The entire user interface of the Flash app looks copied straight from Snapchat. Right from the way the Send message symbol looks or the filters show on the app or to the way of having disappearing messages, it’s all very Snapchatty. The only difference between Flash and Snapchat seems to be that users can layer stickers and emojis over their text.
Description for the app on the Google Play Store reads, “Welcome to Flash! Share all your everyday moments with friends! Take selfies, send videos and chat. Easily add fun face masks, draw and send disappearing messages. It’s fast and works great on most phones. Get the new app now on Android and send flashes with friends!”
While it will be interesting to see how Flash fares for Facebook, there is no news yet on an official worldwide rollout for Flash.
