With the release of a new video app called Clips, Apple is inching one step closer to fully engaging in the messaging world, where its huge base of iPhone users could help it compete with Snapchat and Facebook's Messenger.

Clips, which will hit Apple's App Store in April, lets customers take videos and add animated captions and titles, complete with colourful emoji symbols. The app also makes it possible to stitch together multiple video clips and add speech bubbles and filters.

The functions closely resemble those that drive Snap's wildly popular Stories feature. With Stories, Snap users string together photos and videos, embellish them and then post them to their feeds.

Apple's new Clips lets users post their video to Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo and more. But if users post them to Apple's own Messages app, Apple will recommend whom to share it with based on which friends are in the videos and whom the user frequently contacts – the kind of predictive social features Facebook excels at.

Apple has a huge number of users for Messages, the flagship app for short notes that is built into the iPhone's iOS 10 software. Apple does not say how many people use the app, but it does say that there more than one billion iOS devices on the market and that 79 per cent of them run iOS 10.

Apple also says that Messages is the most commonly used app on iOS devices, giving the company potentially up to 800 million users for its latest messaging platform. Snap, by contrast, has 161 million daily active users. While Apple's Clips competitor will technically be a separate app from Messages, it will be tied closely to it for the ability to share Clips videos with other Apple users.

Facebook has more than one billion users for both Messenger, which was split off from the main Facebook service in 2014, and for WhatsApp, which it acquired in a multibillion-dollar deal the same year.

Reuters