Snapchat finally realizes that ignoring Android was a disaster

Snapchat hasn’t had a very good year with their app as more and more people moved to other apps such as Instagram and WhatsApp (who has been copying their best features) to share stories. Now it seems as their own story has gone from bad to worse very quickly as the company shared its financials for the third quarter. Well, they’re bad. The company only managed to acquire 4.5 million new Snapchat users for the quarter which is much less than they anticipated.

In response, the company has announced a big UI overhaul for Android devices which will make the app better and easier to use and hopefully pull in more users. The company acknowledged their lethargic approach towards Android and promised to focus more on the OS to re-build the app from scratch in hope of getting more users.

Till now Snapchat has been seriously neglecting their Android user base. Compared to iOS users, Snapchat photos on even high-end Android phones always look worse for example. This is because  Snapchat doesn’t exactly take a photo on your Android device. Instead, it just grabs the screenshot of the live Camera feed and lets you share it. This is not a hardware or software restriction. It is just that Snapchat development team being lazy and taking an easy way out while coding.

There have also been reports of features making its way to iOS well before Android. The user-base of Android is too big to ignore and whether they like it or not, they will have to keep up with it to sustain in the market.

A somewhat humbled CEO Evan Spiegel admitted their attitude towards Android so far has been a mistake and in a statement to investors, referring to overhauling their Android app, said: “We wish we had done this sooner.”

We don’t know what future holds for Snapchat but we do know one thing for sure, if the company wants to sustain and exist in the long run then they will have to work and fix all the issues with the Android app and make it at par with the iOS app. Many of our readers will know the company does have a history of skipping mobile platform and to be fair it did work in their favour with Windows Phone but unfortunately, it is not going to work with Android.

Via: Android Authority; The Verge