Facebook appeared to be launching its latest attempt to combat Snapchat with a new app called Slingshot that was briefly in the App Store on Monday.
Disappearing from the store like an ephemeral "Snap," Slingshot featured a simple messaging interface that let users write captions and draw on photo and video messages before sending them, TechCrunch reported. The messages will disappear after being viewed.
Facebook didn't notify the press about the new app, so little information was available, according to TechCrunch.
Slingshot follows the death of Poke, an earlier app that was intended to compete with Snapchat. Facebook reportedly tried to buy Snapchat for $3 billion last year and was turned down.
While the social network hasn't released any details, Slingshot likely comes from Facebook's Creative Labs skunkworks division, a group of small teams working on smaller projects within Facebook, TechCrunch noted. Earlier this year, Creative Labs released Paper, an app that focuses on news and longer-form content.
Slingshot has a key difference from Snapchat: Users have to reply to a friend's missive with one of their own before "unlocking" the message.
Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke to The New York Times in April about "unbundling" the social network's big blue app into smaller, more focused uses.
"I think on mobile, people want different things," he said. "Ease of access is so important. So is having the ability to control which things you get notifications for. And the real estate is so small. In mobile there's a big premium on creating single-purpose first-class experiences."
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