How To Livestream On Snapchat & Connect With Your Friends Using The App's Latest Updates

For those in the aggressive market of keeping people glued to their phones, Snapchat may have just beaten everyone to the punch. The messaging app on Tuesday announced a serious overhaul of its chat platform to make skipping between communication mediums easier. Whether you want to try audio calling, video chatting, send texts, stickers or even leave messages, this new app will allow you to keep in touch (or not, depending on your mood) seamlessly with your friends. So how do you livestream on Snapchat?

Well, the good news is that you'll no longer have to navigate the labyrinth that once was the Snapchat interface page to try to figure out if your friends were around for a little video hangout. Snapchat has streamlined the system so that video chatting is as easy as touching a small video icon. You can also use the "fly on the wall" approach to video chatting, which allows you to choose whether you want to show yourself as available or just watch what's going on.

The Snapchat app has added a pile of new sticker options within their chat tab too, which will make communicating without actually having to use words so much easier. (And really, isn't that the goal?)

Still, if you'd rather, you know, talk to your friends instead of communicating via adorable emojis and stickers, there's a new update for you too. Here's how you can access the shiny new livestream feature.

This new livestream feature has changed the face of social communication in a serious way for Snapchat users. As Josh Constine at Tech Crunch points out:

Snapchat is the closest thing to a direct window from your friends’ lives into yours. That’s going to make it very hard for competitors to dig underneath and offer any advancement significant enough to pull people away.

While Snapchat may once have been generally considered a social messaging app for tweens, this new Chat 2.0 offered by Snapchat has changed the way we will keep in touch, according to Constine. "This all makes Snapchat less of a messaging app and more a full communication suite richer than anything else your device has to offer."

Snapchat's competitors like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp already offer some similar features but they're lacking in one pivotal area: neither offer a simple option to switch between different conversation mediums like audio, text, and video messaging.

So how do Snapchat customers feel about the new features? Well, at this point reviews are mixed. Some seem to feel the app is too confusing to navigate, or just plain pointless.

Other customers are feeling the love for the more comprehensive app, though.

Love it or hate it, Snapchat seems to be bringing us one step closer to fully communicating without having to actually be in the same room as anyone. The future is now.