Snapchat Maker Abandoning Its Pixy Drone Is a Blow to All Consumers

Burning consumer trust is a rite of passage most companies seem eager to partake in. Those defining moments could be anything: from innocuous inability to gauge the future to disingenuous financial schemes. Most companies, at some point, will reach junctures that stick with consumers and leave a bad taste in their mouths.

Most recently, Snap, the company behind Snapchat, announced it will lay of 20 percent of its employees and discontinue its brand-new Pixy drone, raising questions and concerns that have long simmered in my mind. What happens when a company introduces a product only to backtrack shortly after?

Promise of Pixy

There's a chance you didn't even know the company had made a small, controller-less video-taking drone, because within four months of announcing it and beginning to sell it, Snap has canceled it. I had gotten my hands on one pretty quickly and reviewed it overall favorably. I even packed it along for an out-of-state vacation because I wanted to get some unique memories—and it delivered!

Pixy, at launch, was far from perfect, but it had that magical quality that made it worth considering. It was yet another opportunity for Snap to give its Snapchat users a way to get unique videos into its app. (Even non-Snapchat users could use it to its fullest.) It's really hard to come up with photography-related products that aren't a mobile phone, but Snap did it.

As neat as Pixy was, however, it wasn't going to be the new cornerstone of Snap. Its cancellation isn't a detriment to the company. It's a small blip that might not register on most people's radar. But, each time this happens, it's like a game of musical chairs for consumers, and one chair is pulled from the circle. Every time a company ships a product and then quickly says never mind, it is yanking a chair out from under people paying real money for its products.

Car Thing and Pixy

Spotify officially launched its Car Thing vehicle music player in February 2022 and then pulled it within six months. That relatively quick jettisoning of its first piece of hardware will likely make future efforts unattractive to potential buyers. I know my skepticism rose quite a bit. Why risk money on a product that could be discontinued in less than a year?

The sentiment carries over to Snap, as well. Even though Pixy was ill-timed, I will be highly suspicious of future hardware releases. The company has great ideas, but physical products are not core to its business. They are ripe to get abandoned first. The doubt even creeps into thoughts of its software, too. Will risky app features be gone before they've been given a chance? Should people be wary of getting attached to certain settings?

Unlike Spotify, Snap does have a track record of doing hardware—even if limited. It debuted its Spectacles camera glasses in 2016 and then did a second version in 2018. The first Spectacles were similar in their limitations to Pixy's. The second generation of the glasses, however, were better looking, waterproof and overall addressed a lot of the initial concerns. I was hopeful that Pixy would receive the same treatment and that a second generation of the drone would address battery life and stability in the wind.

Hardware might not be a core business for Snap, but its glasses and drone were a compelling blue-ocean product space for it to travel. The fable goes that there is blood in the water where there is intense fighting and so locating a spot where the water is blue means finding an area with more freedom from competition. Snap was onto that by doing hardware that wasn't a phone, for which it didn't have to compete against Samsung, Google and Apple.

Even if abandoning its drone means saving some money now, Snap's cancellation of Pixy destroys any real momentum it had in consumer hardware. It's hard to come by unique products that still have some creativity to them.

Consumer Products

Back in 2012, Google announced a Nexus Q speaker system but never shipped it. Samsung once showed off a Bixby home speaker meant to compete with HomePod, but consumers never got a chance to buy it. Even Apple announced a fancy wireless charging pad called AirPower that it never released.

It stings to learn of promised products and then wait for them, only for those things never to become available. When this happens, it costs consumer loyalty in some immeasurable way. It hurts all consumers a little bit. Over time, more people become hesitant about trusting companies to actually deliver on products. The sting is even sharper for consumers who support businesses like Snap and buy their products from day one.

In the end, some people will conclude that Snap never should have released a tiny photography drone with 5 minutes of fly time in the first place. To some, it was always a flawed product that wasn't going to get a ton of support. I disagree. Pixy pushed the bounds of drones farther into the consumer space than nearly anything before it.

Pixy was a worthwhile endeavor because providing more video and photo products make Snap a more robust company. Unless this hardware unit would ultimately be responsible for bankrupting the company, I think Snap simply needed to retain the vision long enough not to burn trust with its early adopters. Plus, I bet the next generation of the drone could have been pretty remarkable.