After 13 long years, Snapchat finally has a native iPad version

If, instead, your first experience of Snapchat was right now with its brand-new, long-awaited, much-anticipated iPad app, then you've just had its full glory in somewhere between 11 inches and 13 inches. It's exactly the same instant social media Snapchat it ever was on iPhones, and that's quite possibly how it should be.

For a Snapchat fan, the new iPad app is an almost no-compromise, properly scaled up version of the iPhone app. It offers all the immediate sharing of videos and photos, of distorting your face or covering it in hilarious makeup.

If you're not a Snapchat fan, ditto.

The signup and login screens are still expanded iPhone ones and look very bare. Then when you're using it, you have no option but to hold your iPad in portrait mode — there is no landscape Snapchat at all.

It's otherwise seemingly identical to the iPhone experience, except that it has been nicely revised for its new device. The app uses its new screen size well and, once logged in, there is none of the usual obvious scaling up or spacing out of images.

And there's also no escaping that within seconds you are contacted by a stranger wanting to chat.

Snapchat came to the iPhone in 2011. But it came some 15 months after the iPad was released, so there was surely already a market, and there was surely enough time to make a native iPad edition.

Which the company ultimately did, some 13 years later. Better late than never, we suppose.

But then it's here now and that's not something you can say about Instagram, whose developer still says the iPad market isn't big enough to bother about.

Plus Snapchat has done its move to iPad very well. If you like that sort of thing.