Unlike most instant messaging apps, Snapchat has no feature that shows you if a friend is active or not. In addition to that, the platform actively tries to prevent you from tracking its users’ active status, with an impressive success level.
However, there is a flaw that makes it possible to check if someone is active on Snapchat. This flaw is tied to one of the most loved Snapchat features, Snap Maps.
What if you’re trying to tell if someone is active without going the Snap Maps route? This article will explore the possibility of telling if someone is active on Snapchat without their location.
Can you tell if someone is active on Snapchat without Snap Maps?
You can, and I can think of a hypothetical scenario where you might need to check someone’s active status without Snap Maps.
If someone enables Ghost Mode on Snapchat, you technically can’t locate them via Snap Maps anymore. The inability to locate them using Snap Maps implies you can’t check if they’re active on Snapchat using the feature.
Provided that they’re still friends with you, you can always tell if they are active on Snapchat, albeit less comfortably.
For one, you can’t tell how long they’ve logged out if they are not active. Snap Maps appear to be the only Snapchat feature that comes close to telling you when someone was last active.
Enough of the talking, and let’s jump into the detailed steps required to check Snapchat active status without location.
How to Tell If Someone Is Active on Snapchat Without Their Location
- Using Snapchat Chats
Do you know you can deduce a user’s active status on Snapchat by sending them a snap? Now you know. Thanks to the status reports for messages on Snapchat, you can tell if someone is online and ghosting you or busy and offline.
While you may expect the processes to be difficult and quite complicated, it’s simple. You may have been using it without realizing it, and I’ll remind you how to use it even more flexible.
Here’s how to check if someone is active on Instagram from Instagram messages without using Snap Maps.
- Open Snapchat on your smartphone and swipe to the right from the main interface to open your Chats. You can also tap the Chat icon from the bottom row icons. It’s the second icon from the left.
If you’ve never conversed with the target on Snapchat, you should open your friends’ list from your profile instead.
- Using the search bar if necessary, find the user’s Snapchat account from your chat or friends list. If the target isn’t your friend on Snapchat, all of the following steps will be ineffective.
- From that Chat interface, send a message to the user (via Snapchat, of course). The message can be anything, but don’t let them think you were trying to check if they were active.
The goal of this idea is pretty simple. Snapchat has status reports for messages to show the senders how their message is doing.
When you send a message through Snapchat on a device with an internet connection, the automatic status is ‘Sent.’ If you don’t have any problems with the recipient, you should see ‘Delivered.’
However, if the recipient has blocked or restricted you, your message will be stuck in Sent forever, and you won’t even get a chance to tell if they’re active.
When the recipient opens the Snapchat app on their smartphone, they’ll receive the notification for the message, graduating the status report from ‘Delivered’ to ‘Received.’
If your message’s status changes to Received, the recipient may be ignoring you on Snapchat. But it’s still too early to jump to conclusions; people open Snapchat for reasons other than chatting!
In this sense, you should try this a couple of times before making a final decision. If you’re positive that the target is ghosting you, do whatever pleases you.
READ MORE: How to Know the Last Time Someone Was Active on Snapchat
- Checking their recent activity
There are many things you can only do if you’re active on Snapchat, and chatting is only one of them. Ignoring all the other potential ways to tell if someone is active may be unwise.
Check your Snapchat stories; has the user uploaded anything to their story recently? If someone continuously adds new photos and videos to their stories, won’t it be quite difficult to believe that they aren’t very active on Snapchat?
- Checking their Snapscore
Snapscore, also dubbed Snapchat score, is the perfect way to discover if a person has been avoiding you but chatting with other people on Snapchat.
While Snapchat introduced Snapscores as a popularity feature, you can easily reverse engineer it to serve as a tool for checking if someone is active on Snapchat without using Snap Maps or Chats.
To understand why Snapscore works so well, you need to understand how to increase it. Your Snapscore increases for every Snap you send and receive on Snapchat.
With that understood, you should know that there is no way a user’s Snapscore will accumulate significantly unless they’re chatting away on the platform.
But you should check out Snapscore’s flaw. It increases when a Snapchat user sends and receives a message, so they only have partial control over their Snapchat score.
Nonetheless, it’s quite a revealing way to learn about someone’s Snapchat activity without using Snap Maps.
READ MORE: How to Tell if Someone Is Ignoring You on Snapchat
Conclusion
When you need to check if someone is active on Snapchat, only one thing comes to mind: Snap Maps. It’s an easy way to tell if someone is online, but anyone can counter it painlessly.
If the target user enables Ghost Mode, you’ll be unable to tell if they’re active on Snapchat through the feature.
Thanks to some of our discoveries, you don’t have to. The status reports from Snapchat messages, coupled with the user’s recent Snapchat activity and their Snap score, are all you need to make pretty perfect estimates.
Note that most of these won’t work if you aren’t friends; that’s so you know!