I use Snapchat for quite percisely half a year now actively and there aren’t many reasons why I’m using it. The main reason for me I think is the easy way of staying in contact with people you don’t see that often or people you’d like to have contact with, but it doesn’t happen by itself because there is no specific reason why you should write WhatsApp messages or something similar. With Snapchat you can just send a snap without a very specific reason (oh my god that sounds so much like an ad… it isn’t!) and stay in contact like this. Also I think Snapchat managed it quite good to stick people to use their service everyday because of the snapstreaks (probably known as the „flames“). The main concept of the App is great and I love it! But there are some points in Snapchat’s existence that I barely hate!
First thing: the enormous battery usage. I‘ve never ever seen an app before that sucks so much out of my battery in such a short time. If any Snapchat developer reads this for whatever reason, please, PLEASE make your app not so much depending on the camera, it’s negatively insane how fast it drains it.
Second thing: the almost same enormous data usage (maybe I just think that because I snap so much?). While Snapchat drains your battery in five minutes, it also sucks every available Byte out of your mobile data flat if you also use the snaps for chatting (instead of the chat function or WhatsApp etc, I know it‘s kinda dumb, but who doesn’t use snaps for messaging?), I‘m pretty sure there is a way to compress the images without a big loss in quality.
Third thing: the camera integration (biggest problem on Android, I don‘t care but many people do!). Snapchat’s camera integration is awful. While on iOS it’s mostly okay (far away from good, I‘ll come to that soon), it’s incredibly awful on Android, because Snapchat doesn’t use the native camera interface, instead it grabs a preview of what the camera sees and takes a screenshot of that. I mean come on, you’re a million-dollar-company, you can hire some guys who care about the native camera integration, it can’t be that difficult. On iOS meanwhile it’s mostly okay, but it would be nice to be able to use the optical image stabilizer for not always getting blurried images because of a bit shaky hand…
For sure that is only the negative things I’ve talked about that detailed, but you can be sure that the positive outweighs! I love Snapchat and I think that I won‘t be able to not use it anymore (even if I thought about it before, but it is too nice at all). Even if I have to carry a powerbank with me all day, I will do that if it‘s the price ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ For example the Bitmoji stickers are so great! If you don’t want to write much or make your conversation more expressive, you just pick one of the millions of stickers (that sounds like an ad again, I’m sorry, but if I like something, I write or talk about it like I want to sell it ¯\__(•-•)__/¯) and put it in the middle of your snap. Or to the side. Or that it looks like it hides behind a object in your snap. It’s always nice what you can do with these stickers.
Another great feature are the filters for example. You wouldn’t randomly write someone that you are at the cinema in the next city but so you just send a snap from the cinema or your popcorn with the name of the city or whatever… I also kinda like the (probably most useless feature) snap score, which shows you how many snaps you ever sent and received (I can now tell you, that I had about 55000 snaps in the last half year, that’s just crazy!)… but every example that I write about here is crappy and not convincing, but I just try to explain my thoughts about Snapchat… However I think I said enough now, positive as well as negative facts…
Meanwhile it would be great if Snapchat would rebuild it’s app completely, without the camera as main-screen (because that is what sucks most out of your battery); maybe with a more design-guideline-following design on both Android and iOS or an Apple Watch App (for viewing snaps and sending black ones with text only (this is never gonna happen)).
Probably I forgot to mention a bunch of things, but however I hope you enjoyed reading this and maybe you will try Snapchat now the first time or use it again after a longer period of ignoring it…
Thanks for reading and I wish you a nice day or night or whatever is there when you are reading this, your snap-dicted Niko 🙂
(hehe I love making these puns)
