Snapchat has been lauded as the hottest social messaging service out there. It’s unique, it’s popular, and it’s at the fingertips of Gen Y and Gen Z. I use it myself, and it’s a fun app.

But I think the hype around it may be temporary. It’s true that Snapchat has seen high growth and mass-market adoption — but it’s also true that it’s one of the smaller players in the social messaging space.

When we take a look at social messaging apps we see the biggest services like WhatsApp, WeChat, and LINE driving amazing growth. WhatsApp just reached the 1 billion user mark this week. WeChat and LINE are giant messaging platforms in APAC and only growing. And I haven’t even yet mentioned Messenger, Facebook’s other social messaging service, which is nearing the 1 billion user mark as well.

Among the top downloaded social and messaging apps, Snapchat is beaten out by WhatsApp and Messenger in nearly every market on both iOS and Android, according to data from AppAnnie. In reality, it’s not competing that well against other social and messaging apps. I can only see this gap widening in the next six months.

Snapchat’s success is written more in its media buzz than its size. And that makes sense for now because it has an amazing story. It’s the startup that declined a $3 billion acquisition offer from Facebook. It relies on temporary content in a day and age where most other services make whatever content is sent through them available indefinitely.

But things just aren’t adding up when it comes to long term growth and stability. Unless Snapchat evolves in a dramatic way, I’m having a hard time thinking all of the attention it’s getting is deserved. With its user figures not even being released, it could be on a trajectory to stall.

Snapchat is surviving right now because of its media buzz, but it won’t be here much longer if it doesn’t mature. It’s simply not as big as other social messaging platforms. It’s not very brand-friendly, according to many marketers I’ve spoken with who find that advertising on the platform requires giving up a lot of control of content. It doesn’t even offer the same value proposition and is rather somewhere in between a messaging app and a media hub — while not excelling at either. (The messages vanish, and the media content isn’t easy to search or discover.)

What Snapchat offers right now is a fun, trendy way to consume news. But won’t people grow out of this fad and back to more normalized content?

Snapchat could be a serious threat to other social networks if — and only if — it decided to focus on one thing: real discovery. By this I don’t mean what Snapchat calls discovery in its Discover tab. What’s lacking on Snapchat are actual discovery features for searchable content. The Discover tab is a great feature for publishers to create snackable content, videos, and articles, but this type of curation can’t be the future of consuming content and thus the future of journalism.

Snapchat has come a long way — and perhaps a lot farther than any of us could have predicted. But let us not forget that Snapchat is not alone in the social messaging space. Innovation by WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and others could make a lot of Snapchat’s value prop obsolete. In order to be a serious contender in the social space and keep itself in the eye of the media, Snapchat needs to offer its users more substantive content features and decide what exactly it wants to be. It’s a great platform for now, but if it doesn’t evolve, it might just vanish, too.  Jan Rezab
Founder & Chairman of Socialbakers, Forbes 30 under 30