Hacker News Reader

Comment by kevinmannix | Hacker News Reader

I've always been amazed by the product adaptability of Snapchat in spite of the apps technical shortcomings, so much so that I believed the buginess of their app may have only applied to myself. In a world where Amazon loses X% of dollars from milliseconds of latency, the poor performance and bugs of Snapchat apparently do not matter to most users which is quite surprising.

View on HN

People are more tolerant of buggy and/or slow tech if said tech might increase their chances of getting laid. A more direct example is Tinder and other dating apps like it: the quality of those apps are somewhat lower than others with similar popularity, but people just deal with it anyway.

Just out of curiosity, what are your issues with Tinder? I haven't really used it a lot, but it seems very nicely-designed. Its performant, the UI is intuitive, it does one thing and does it well. I would almost use it as a case-study in good mobile-first design thinking.

Seems okay to me on Android.

There are a few issues though I have noticed:

* Cards can sometimes glitch out. I've had overlapping cards get stuck and had to restart the app a few times.

* Bios take a long to load compared to photos etc. for some reason.

Mostly, but you swipe left to get rid of someone, and swipe left to see the next image a person has if you are on their profile. occasionally I get this mixed up and swipe left on someone I was interested in.

I experience regular UI glitches and occasional full app hangs that require a force kill to reset, the latter most notably in poor connectivity situations like the subway. It's not terrible, it's just not that good either. It's tier-2 app quality with a tier-1 size userbase.

Are you on Android? I switched back from Android to iOS a while back, and my impression is that their android app is the much crappier version.

My bet is that Apple's review procedure blocks a lot of "alternative" things Snapchat did

BTW, the same with Instagram. When I used Android version, most videos were unplayable or freezing in the middle. When pressing photo shutter button actual taking of photo occured 5-10 seconds later so it was a challenge just to take photo (builtin photo app worked well). And it was on older Nexus, not on some random chinese phone.

Did you by any chance move to a newer iphone than your nexus was?

I'm actually on iOS. I used to be a version or two behind, but with an iPhone 6 I expect the camera to open & be ready to shoot video within 2 seconds, which doesn't happen currently. It's much slower and I usually don't end up capturing the moment I want to capture

I read (a long time ago) that Android Snapchat takes a screenshot of the image on the screen projected by the camera, while the iOS Snapchat actually uses the image produced from the camera.

Snapchat has never seemed buggy or slow to me. It is way more stable and and simple than anything from Facebook, that's for sure.

Agreed, but the concept & use of their app is (supposed to be) much simpler so it's not quite comparing apples to apples.

Does achieving stability through a simple design not count for anything?

That's like comparing the stability and speed of a Chevy Cobalt and a Kia Rio.

If you don't have competitors, why optimize?

points to post because you will :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com