Clips is the Apple-made video sharing app that’s not a social media network

Apple clearly knows how popular video sharing is over social media, so it created a new way for iOS users to make and share videos. Today, the company announced a new app called Clips, a video-creation app that borrows many features from social media outlets' video-sharing apps but doesn't actually have a social media network attached to it. It appears Apple's goal with Clips is to provide a way to easily make fun videos by stringing together clips, music, text, and more, and then sharing them over social media.

Clips seems to be built for the generation that spends most of its time sharing video or photos over the Internet. It works similarly to Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram video features in that you press the record button to start a snippet of video and release your finger to end that snippet. You can record a bunch of snippets and package them together in one video and then add music, text, filters, emojis, shapes, and more. Clips includes a bunch of full-screen animated posters and backgrounds to choose from, as well, and a library of music tracks that automatically adjust to fit the length of your video.

The most unique feature is Live Titles, which lets you impose text over a video clip using your voice. You can record what you want to say, and Live Titles will translate it into text that appears over the video. It's almost like an easier way to close-caption a video, and it's certainly a quicker way to add a lot of text over a video clip than typing it out yourself. After you record a Live Title, you can edit it with different styles, punctuation, and emoji as well. This feature isn't just available for English speakers: Live Titles will support up to 36 different languages.

But Clips is all about creation—there's no social network attached to it, although you can share a Clips video through iMessage with your contacts. Clips will even suggest specific contacts you may want to share a video with, based on the people who appear in it (Clips appears to have some facial-recognition abilities) and with whom you share things the most. Otherwise, Clips videos are meant to be shared on other social media including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Vimeo, and YouTube.

We knew Clips was coming: rumors of an Apple-made video sharing app have been swirling since last summer. At the time, the unnamed app sounded much like Snapchat, but Clips videos don't disappear after sending them. You also have slightly more control over who sees your Clips videos, compared to blasting a Snapchat story to all your friends (and pseudo-friends). Creating Clips is a very Apple thing to do. Instead of building a new video-centric social network, Apple made an app it hopes will be the video-creation app of choice for those who regularly make and share videos on the Internet.

Clips will be available in April and will work on iPhone 5s and newer devices, the new 9.7-inch iPad, iPad Air and iPad Pro models, iPad mini 2 and later, and iPod touch 6th generation. All devices must be running iOS 10.3 to use Clips.

Listing image by Apple