Third party apps haven't been a thing for a while, people were saving snaps without notifying the user who sent the pictures, resulting in the whole thing going against their purpose (and why they got popular - mostly sending nudes because they disappeared).

So they cracked down pretty hard.

In terms of privacy, assume nothing on the platform is private.

It’s proprietary software, they only have an APi for marketing related requests and you’re unlikely to find someone spending time reverse engineering the application.

Following for interest. It's the most sketchy social media app I linger on to just to keep in touch with a small handful of folks. It'd be nice to find an alternative client. Last I checked I don't think there are any revanced/morphe patches for it, though I should check that again.