Deleting your Snapchat account: How it’s done

Snapchat has long made a name for itself among other popular instant messengers. Its biggest draw? Pictures, videos, and stories that you send or receive from contacts are only available for a few seconds and are deleted immediately after viewing. These so-called “snaps” can also be edited with various filters, stickers, and effects. How could you not like the app? Maybe it’s because you aren’t satisfied with its lackluster data protection or because you’ve outgrown their younger target group. Maybe your hoped-for Snapchat fame didn’t work out, and you’ve lost interest in the app.

If you want to remove your account again, it is not enough to just delete Snapchat. As with other apps, your personal data will remain stored on the operator’s servers even if the small yellow ghost icon has disappeared from your smartphone. As with many other services of this nature, the actual function for deleting your account is hard to find – after all, the provider is reluctant to lose users. Depending on the individual case, it may even be sufficient to deactivate your Snapchat account temporarily instead of deleting it completely. We offer detailed, step-by-step instructions for both.

If you allow the 30 days to elapse without reactivating your account, it will be permanently deleted. This means that all your contacts and any snaps you may have stored in the app’s archive will also be irrevocably deleted. In addition, your Snapchat name will become available again so that other users may be able to maintain their own account under your name. For these reasons, the step of deleting your account should be considered carefully. In case of doubt, the first step is to deactivate your Snapchat account. If you still don’t feel like resuming your snapchat activities, your account will automatically disappear after 30 days.

So, while it is possible to back up your snaps before deleting your Snapchat account, this kind of function doesn’t exist for third-party apps. This is due to the inherent transience of the app. Dedicated third-party apps, which can be found in abundance in the app store and on Google Play, can help. Since a large data leak in October 2014, however, Snapchat is trying to remove applications like “Snap-Hack” from the store offerings at regular intervals. The basic rule is: Use at your own risk. Most third-party apps quickly turn out to be fraudulent, and in the worst case you risk having your Snapchat account blocked by using them.

Of course, you can also use the short time before an image disappears to take an awkward screenshot of it. However, this has the disadvantage that your contact will be informed about it. By using a common recorder app (for example, the Apowersoft Screen Recorder on Android), you can secretly record videos from your smartphone screen. Since processed data is also temporarily stored in your phone’s cache, certain apps and applications even allow you to restore deleted images and videos.