Snapchat beta reveals “cheerios” selfie drone is still on track, ability to mute location coming soon too

Snapchat may not be the most popular instant messaging app around, but it still has a fairly loyal userbase comprising mostly of younger adults within its demographics. Lately, Snapchat was also one of the partners of choice for Google, with the Pixel 6 series getting an exclusive “Quick Tap to Snap” feature. With the Pixel 6 actually managing great sales for Google, the partnership may be turning fruitful for both the parties involved. We took a look inside the latest Snapchat beta to find that the company is continuing to work on its selfie drone, while users could soon look forward to muting the locations of others on their Snap Map.

An APK teardown can often predict features that may arrive in a future update of an application, but it is possible that any of the features we mention here may not make it in a future release. This is because these features are currently unimplemented in the live build and may be pulled at any time by the developers in a future build.

Snap Inc’s “Cheerios” Selfie Drone

Snapchat 11.66.0.20 Beta includes several new stub strings that talk about a feature/product codenamed “cheerios“, which got us curious about what it is. Upon further investigation, we found that “cheerios” already had a whole host of stub strings present within the APK. While we could not trace which APK version initially introduced the first set of strings, we have spotted evidence of the addition of new strings in the most recent APK, allowing us to believe that the feature/product continues to be in development.

Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub %1$d Stub Are you sure? Cheerios Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Your device is too close to the ground. Your device is too cold! Try again when it's back to room temperature. Your device is too hot! Try again when it's back to room temperature. Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub %1$s\10%2$s Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Import When you import a Snap from Cheerios, the Snap can also import to your phone’s Camera roll. \10Importing to your camera roll will use up more storage space. Import to Memories and Camera Roll Import to Memories Import Destination Cheerios is currently connected to a computer for USB Import. Disconnect Cheerios to import Snaps through Snapchat. Connected to Computer Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub %1$s %2$d%% %1$s %2$d %3$s %1$s Close Skip Onboarding Stub Keep Watching Stub? Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Stub Attempting to connect... Maybe Later Wi-Fi Disabled Cheerios require Wi-Fi to import your Snaps into Memories. Lost Connection Your Cheerios device has been disconnected. Reconnect to import Snaps. Enable Reconnect

A cursory look at these placeholder strings would indicate that cheerios is likely to be a drone. As The Information had reported last year, Snapchat’s parent company Snap Inc. had revived its plans to work on a selfie drone. No information was available since then regarding if and when Snap had plans to start selling the drone. However, we can at least now confirm that development work is still in progress for this device. It still remains unclear what shape the product ends up taking, and if it will reach the market.

Muting Location on Snap Map

Snap Map is a feature on Snapchat that broadcasts your location to your friends. These location broadcasts incoming from your friends are then populated onto a map, showing the precise location of friends you have added. Think of it as Always On Location Sharing, and yes, people choose to do it. The feature is actually quite popular among Snapchat users. Another part of Snap Maps that’s popular amongst the younger demographic is the heat maps that are generated by user-submitted geotagged photos in areas, to check out recent activities in those locations.

One downside of the feature so far (apart from all the privacy ones) has been that you cannot actually mute anyone’s location. If a friend has chosen to share their location with you, there’s no way to not display it on the map. If you have a large enough friend list, your map display could become very crowded. However, this could soon change, as the new strings indicate that you may be able to mute a friend’s location on the Snap Map in the future.

You won't see this friend's location on Snapchat. You can always unmute their location again. Are you sure you want to mute %s's Location?

The feature is not yet live on our end, so we hope to see it go live soon.