Snapchat’s experience on Android has always been subpar compared to its iOS sibling. This has even become a meme on Twitter and the likes where people roast how bad the experience on Android is.
Snap knows how bad the experience is, to the point where Evan Spiegel, Snap’s CEO said that they have a subpar Android app adn they want to change it.
They have been testing a rebuilt app for some time, since late 2018 and now they have finally rolled it out to the general public.
To @Android. Love, Snapchat. #SnapForAndroid pic.twitter.com/MGOFQYa9Cj
— Snapchat (@Snapchat) April 8, 2019
“Enjoy the new, faster Snapchat rebuilt just for Android,” the notice said.
There is virtually no changes to the user interface for the new app, but the app should be faster and less buggy than before. Apparently what Snap was doing before with Snapchat for Android was that they were just patching the problems.
Android Authority sat down with Snapchat’s SVP, Jerry Hunter who explained further about the Snapchat for Android problem. “We found, towards the end of nine months that it was sort of asymptotically harder to create more improvement and it was still not good enough. That was a really a consequence of a code base that had just been built,” he said.
So this prompted them to do something dramatic. They decided to rewrite the app from the ground up. The biggest problem was to let Snapchat use the hardware to its fullest potential on every Android smartphone. The challenge was to build an Android app that works well on flagship devices.
Hunter also said that Snapchat is now running a much broader set of test devices, which is great so that future updates work as expected.
This is big for Snapchat as they have decide to completely revamp on the inside how the Snapchat app works for Android. It had gotten to the point where they were working wit Google for it to work well with Snapchat, Huawei too with their P30 series and also with the Samsung Galaxy S10.
