First, we’ve introduced Long-Term Support (LTS) SDK releases, a major milestone for the Camera Kit Platform. LTS is a commitment from Snap’s Camera Kit team to provide support for one year following the initial release of an SDK version, including critical bug fixes and security patches. The goal of our LTS policy is to deliver peace of mind that the initial version can be maintained over a longer time period — without the need to upgrade to the newest version every six weeks.
Next, we’ve open-sourced the Camera Kit integration with Unity in direct response to feedback we’ve received from the developer community requesting Unity support. We learned that many members of our community wanted to integrate Camera Kit into both iOS and Android apps without the need for extensive native development skills. With this in mind, we built a Unity sample project that wraps the Camera Kit iOS and Android SDKs and can launch Camera Kit experiences in Unity-built applications. By introducing this solution, we’re making Camera Kit accessible to more developers, enabling them to focus on AR content creation — without the hurdles of acquiring new skill sets for iOS and Android app development. This includes the ability to launch a Lens in parallel with a Unity scene and communicate in real time with the active Lens using Snap’s local communication pathways. The sample project leverages Unity as a Library, which is typically used when a developer has an existing iOS or Android application. For our purposes, however, we’ve added post-processing logic that removes the requirement to write native code (Swift/Kotlin) in order to take advantage of Camera Kit. Now, developers will be able to build an experience using only managed C# code.
Finally, because we’ve received similar requests for Flutter support, we also delivered an open-source sample app for Camera Kit with Flutter using Flutter’s wrapper, MethodChannel, to invoke Camera Kit APIs in native Android and iOS. The sample application shows developers how to quickly integrate Camera Kit into their own Flutter apps with Camera Kit’s default UX.
None of these investments or improvements would have been possible without feedback from developers in our community. A special thank you to those developers who shared their own solutions with fellow community members through the Camera Kit Community Forum and who continue to be heavily engaged in the Camera Kit platform. We’re excited to see what types of experiences developers will build with these updates!