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Comment by dymk | Hacker News Reader

Snap can blame Facebook all they want, but what they had was a feature, not a product, and then they alienated their users with the redesign.

Nobody else is to blame for their own stagnation then failing to reimagine their product.

I mean, Snap Spectacles, really?

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Not really relevant for the antitrust investigation.

The article is about Facebook copying features and draws a connection to Snaps subsequent downfall.

I’m claiming the downfall was inevitable (no product, bad redesign, those useless spectacles), and once again Facebook is the scapegoat in all this.

I think you should reread the article, it has very little to do with copying features. If Snap are correct then Facebook

- actively discouraged IG users from discussing Snap

- prevented Snap from trending on FB

- used data from an acquisition Onavo to track what users did on other apps (such as Snap)

Furthermore - whether or not these shady practices were the downfall of Snap does not absolve FB from doing them.

I'm curious - why is facebook required to promote a competing social network?

Did snap promote facebook properly on its network?

> I'm curious - why is facebook required to promote a competing social network?

They aren't required to promote, but arguably also can't actively find ways to prevent it from trending "organically" as that could ostensibly constitute an anti-competitive practice

You do realize both of these things can be true? Snap playing a role in their issues and Facebook also participating in behaviors that are relevant to an anti-trust investigation?

I’m looking forward to the proof coming from the company that was unable to succeed because of their own ability to execute.

Try compartmentalizing

Everyone and everything is multifaceted

Snap’s not a bankrupt Startup without product, they’re still a 23.5B company with growing market share and features Facebook has been copying hand over fist, that would be arguably be worth a lot more if FB had to come up with their own features instead of Xeroxing Snaps ideas.

Copying features of your competitors and innovating on them is part of competition.

Both things seem to be true. Snap created an unsustainable business model that could be easily copied, and Facebook did a lot of highly unethical and possibly illegal things to accelerate their domination of Snap's market.

If you read the article in full, there's really no defending Facebook's alleged behavior. The article doesn't even mention feature-copying, other than Zuckerberg saying "accept our buyout price or we'll copy you", but it's a single sentence in an article with a laundry list of unrelated allegations. I feel like a lot of people who dislike Snap are commenting without actually reading the article.

the feature/product dichotomy is a subtle gradient that ultimately means nothing. It's only ever seems poignant with the benefit of hindsight. It's sort of like saying "well, the way the market shook out is the way the market shook out"

Indeed, you could say the same thing about IG vs FB, it’s an empty criticism.

Also, curious why we always see these “Snap must regret not selling to FB for $7 billion” comments parroted so often? Snap currently has a market cap of almost $24 billion, and it’s stock price has nearly doubled since the start of 2019. Still not quite at their IPO price, but close. Seems like they should be very happy they went the IPO route?

Actually, I'm super, super grateful they redesigned the Android app from the ground up. Before the redesign it was a disaster that would occasionally soft-brick my camera, mandating a reboot.

Seems like a problem with your camera hardware and/or software. An unprivileged, user-space app should not be able to soft-brick a hardware part.

My phone is a Nexus 5X. All I know is that the old Snapchat app would occasionally soft-brick my camera such that no other application (including the camera app) could use it until I rebooted my phone. I confirmed with multiple experiments that Snapchat was the culprit. After the redesign, the problem went away.

I recall that in Android if an app doesn't release control of the camera then no other app can access it until the phone is rebooted. I suspect this is what was happening here. AFAIK, it isn't a bug with the phone hardware etc. just poor os design. Hopefully they'll fix it one day.

Ref: 'Release the Camera - After using the camera, your application must properly release it for use by other applications.'

I remember the same problem in a Nexus 4. And Google said they couldn't fix it because it was a bug in a Qualcomm driver and they had no access to the source code.

I think the redesign fixed that because Snapchat no longer takes pictures with the camera. Instead, they take screenshots of the camera preview.

Is that true across the board or just on Android?

If such a problem arose on iOS, Apple would patch it. Android manufacturers don't usually have that option, as they sometimes don't even have the code to the drivers.

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