The Sluggish Snapchat.
A mere glance over the enormous Snapchat numbers justifies the massive popularity of the application among the people these days. It’s been just 4 years since its launch, and well, it has 150 million daily active users with 9000 snaps being sent per second. If these stats weren’t enough, it has 10 billion video views daily. Yes, it’s correct: Its billion, with a ‘b’.
Snapchat has proven to be a game changer in the way a social networking app interacts with its users. Technically, it’s just another platform for posting pictures, and sharing messages. Nothing extraordinarily new, yet its out-of-the box implementation has helped it maintain its huge user base. Allowing users to turn up into a puppy, or blow rainbows out from the mouth, or continuing that 48-day streak fire, and much more; have created a unique interaction that doesn’t let user sway away.
As the title says, this article isn’t particularly about the effectiveness of the application, rather to talk about one of its uglier facets: It’s sluggish behavior. We live in a world wanting everything to be quick and smooth, especially in the realm of technology. As it’s said, ‘No internet is better than slow internet.’ Our lives is summed up perfectly by this Oatmeal comic:
I hope you’ll agree with me on the fact that an lagging application is an absolute turnoff! Many of the Snapchat users end up being on the receiving side of really bad load times, and overall sluggish in-app usage. Especially within the Android community, it has been a well-known issue for quite some time now. Evidently, it was declared ‘The biggest Android performance killing app’ in late 2015.
I hate waiting 7–10 seconds waiting before my phone responds well enough for me to take a snap (well, sometimes, it’s even too late for that snap!), and I think even the CEO Evan Spiegel agrees to me on that. Here is a screenshot for a complaint on the issue on Reddit which was posted few months ago, and Mr. Spiegel himself confronted with the problem (That’s so cool though).
Another thing I feel has brought down Snapchat has been the constant number of massive-changeovers updates, throughout the last year or so. And yes, updates are necessary, I know that. I love the way it is evolving, with live feeds, discovering world-feeds, interactive filters, and what-not! Yet, I feel they keep changing the daily usage user-flow, which is certainly not required. For instance, it’s been third, or the fourth time they have made changed to how to move from one story to another. Before, you just tapped, then you had to swipe, followed by a specific right swipe, and recently divided the screen into left and right taps, as well as swipes.
I’ll just say ‘Innovate, but don’t complicate’. Snapchat has always come under the bar for it’s user interface, and I hope they think to fix the performance issues first and foremost, and then continue with their awesomeness.
