Cloning Snapchat is the new brunch, which is the new black. Facebook did it, Instagram did it, even WhatsApp did it. But even so, it’s surprising today to see that Apple’s done it too.

Clips, the new iOS app from the iPhone manufacturer, takes a different tack to cloning Snapchat than most. Apple has finally learned that social networks are not its biggest strength (remember Ping?) so its new app doesn’t have one.

No Clips Stories; no ephemeral messaging; no new usernames to secure or QR codes to share.

Instead, the goal of Clips is to enable the same sort of fun, creative camera tomfoolery that Snapchat does in its main camera app, but with an explicitly destination-neutral approach.

What does that mean in practice? Clips boots up to a Vine-style camera, with the same hold-to-record functionality that that app made popular. Users can string together video, either recorded live or pulled from their album, and still images.

Then, a bevy of Prisma-style filters and other effects can be applied, turning the images into comic-book style line drawings or exaggerating the colour, Instagram-style. A canny use of voice-to-text transcription also enables automatic subtitling, as with Facebook videos, but with more control over presentation.

If that description makes Clips sound like a Frankenstein’s monster of an app, well, it is. But that doesn’t mean it’s not fun. It’s essentially an evolution of Apple’s mobile version of iMovie, its video-editing app. While iMovie on desktop is a fairly fully-fledged video editing app, useful for creating slick videos with a lot of editing, on mobile it’s always been just a bit too heavy-duty for the sort of things it’s used for, like slamming two clips together and putting a bit of music over them.

Alex Hern (@alexhern) I'm sorry pic.twitter.com/U72cdEMv3z

Clips, on the other hand, is exactly as light as it needs to be. You won’t win an Oscar for what you’ve made, but if you have a short video and some accompanying photos that you want to get in a state to post to Facebook or Twitter, it could end up being the app you would turn to.

For it to really take off, it needs to find some originality before long. Snapchat’s lenses are rapidly becoming a recognisable draw to the app, even for people who don’t use it to chat. Prisma’s AI-powered filters are similarly unique. Clips can launch without a draw of its own, but eventually it needs its own calling card.