Snapchat now lets you use your personal emojis and Stickers with Bitmoji integration

Snapchat has added yet another update which brings in a lot more new Stickers, a tabbed interface for the emojis and Stickers and one very significant feature - Bitmoji integration. You can now add in your personalised emoji or Sticker to your Snapchat conversations and updates, thanks to the Bitmoji app’s integration with Snapchat. Snapchat had purchased a Toronto-based startup called Bitstrips , the company behind the Bitmoji app, back in March for $100 mn. Bitmoji, which was launched in September 2014, became famous thanks to the feature which lets you create an online caricature or avatar which can then be integrated with various emojis to show a range of emotions.

To make your own personalised Stickers and emojis, you will need to have the Bitmoji app on your phone. You can either sign in via email or directly via Snapchat. Yes, Snapchat has added a yellow button which lets you log in with your Snapchat credentials - this is a first for the ephemeral app. Once in the app, you go through a series of steps to make your own Bitmoji. You can select skin tones, hair styles, facial hair, eyeglasses and finally clothes to dress up your Bitmoji. In case you have already been using Bitmoji, you will just need to link your Bitmoji account to Snapchat.  Once your avatar is created, you can then go to Snapchat and use it as a regular Sticker on your photos and videos. If a Snapchat friend of yours also has Bitmojis integrated with Snapchat, then you get the option of Friendship Stickers which will feature both the users. The feature seems to still be rolling out as we could not see the Bitmojis under the Stickers menu, as shown in the video above. Bitmojis can be shared across various platforms such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack and so on. This is the latest in the many updates we have seen this year on Snapchat. Some of the major updates this year include introduction of over 300 stickers , one-handed zoom , face-swapping with photos from camera roll, a revamped Discover and Live tabs  feature and much more. Log in with Snapchat What is most interesting about the Bitmoji integration though, apart from the ability to personalise your experience, is the fact that Snapchat has introduced a yellow ‘Log in with Snapchat’ button. This is a big step for the five-year old app. Snapchat is one of those rare apps in which everything happens and stays inside the app. You cannot really share photos or videos from Snapchat to other platforms, unless you download them in your Gallery. So does yellow button mean we will be seeing more apps supporting Snapchat logins? We are used to seeing apps or web services which give you the option to log in using your Facebook ID or your Twitter ID or LinkedIn ID. These apps have a significant mass which enables them to be used as digital IDs to login to different services. Snapchat, at 150 million active users, still lags behind Twitter’s 300 million plus users and is much behind Facebook’s billion odd users. But unlike Twitter and Facebook, Snapchat is growing at a rapid pace. According to pitch deck leaked to TechCrunch, Snapchat has shown an average user growth of 65 percent year on year over last eight quarters. Twitter on the other hand grew by only 3 percent year on year in Q1 of 2016. The yellow ‘Log in with Snapchat’ button is at the moment only integrated with Bitmoji app, which is owned by Snapchat itself. So yes, this may be an exceptional case. For now.